Climbing on a chopped rope - lead rope soloing
Note - This post discusses techniques and methods used in vertical rope work. If you do them wrong, you could die. Always practice vertical rope techniques under the supervision of a qualified instructor, and ideally in a progression: from flat ground, to staircase, to vertical close to the ground before you ever try them in a real climbing situation.
image shared with permission: https://www.vdiffclimbing.com/rope-solo/
Yo! Lead rope soloing is a VERY advanced technique and far beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to do safely. I’m only introducing this technique if you have to use it in the following unfortunate and unlikely situation.
You’re on a committing route and have the following misfortune:
Due to whatever random act of the goddess, your lead rope gets a severe cut or is damaged by rockfall.
To make it even more challenging, the cut is close to the center of the rope. (If the damage is near one end, you may be able to cut the rope and continue climbing on whatever you have left. You may have to get creative with belay anchors.)
Due to the route, your position on it, or whatever, you decide that it’s better to continue leading UP rather than to rappel DOWN. (In many cases, heading down might be the better choice. There are several clever ways to rappel when you can avoid passing that pesky knot entirely. Here's an article on that.)
If you cut out the damaged part of the rope and tie the two pieces together, the knot won't go through protection if you climb and belay in the normal manner.
So, the crucial question: how do you continue to lead?
An option is lead rope soloing. When lead rope soloing, the rope doesn’t pass through the placed gear like in normal leading.
This lets you climb with a knot in the middle of your rope, schweeeet!
But, it's gonna be awkward, slow and kind of scary, so that's not so schweeeet!
Lead rope soloing is normally the realm of socially inept big wall climbers, who can't find a partner for their week+ vertical camping trip on El Capitan, or big wall speed climbers, who do what’s called “short fixing” to efficiently keep climbing while their partner is cleaning the last pitch.
Yann Camus of Bliss Climbing, has online classes in both lead rope solo and top rope solo, Check him out!
You can get a discount on his classes by becoming an Alpinesavvy Premium Member.
