Münter Hitch Deep Dive - 5 Practical Applications Every Climber Needs
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As climbing technology has advanced, we’ve come up with new tools that add to certain failure modes. After body belays, the Münter hitch came into fashion, using a carabiner. After the Münter, we started getting belay plates. But ropes got skinnier, so we need sharper bends in the rope to add enough friction to hold a fall, so tube-style devices became dominant. Then we figured out that if we hang a tube-style device with the climbing rope on top when belaying from the top, the weight on that climbing strand will press on the break strand and the device will kind of “autolock.” So, we added a way to hang the devices in that orientation. Then came break assisting devices like the Petzl Grigri.
We see lots of evolutions like this. Take modern snow traction: leather boots with an alpinestock pole to hobnails to metal crampons and wooden axes to modern front points and specially curved and ergonomic axes and tools.
And with each of these types of evolutions, we end up with a kind of backwards-looking redundancy possibility. If we lose or break our belay device, we can go back to Münter and body-based techniques for belaying - and potentially for rappelling. If we break a crampon, we can use our axe to chop steps in hard snow or ice like they did before front-pointed crampons.
I’m not one of those people who think “the old ways” were better. There is a reason equipment evolved to help solve gaps and safety issues in those old techniques. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t wisdom in those old ways. And we can borrow from that wisdom… but we have to have the knowledge of it. We have to know the shortcomings the lead to the need to evolve the equipment in the first place. Deploying a technique doesn’t mean it’s been deployed well, and we need to be able to assess if the old technique will be “good enough” for the situation we are in.
That’s the motivation behind this video: the Münter can be used in lots of ways. This video goes into five categories of use cases around belaying, rappelling, and rescue demands. But we also need to know and mitigate against some of the shortcoming of the Münter, such as that it twists the rope and provides less friction than modern devices. If we know those things, can we use it if we lose or break some of our more secure, modern equipment? Well, only if we know how.
One of the pieces of “knowhow” for the Münter is that it works best on HMS style carabiners, either large or medium sized. If you care…
For a large HMS carabiner, I typically use the Petzl William
For a medium HMS carabiner, I like the DMM Phantom HMS and the Petzl Attache