A classic beginner mistake (which I did for, ahem, a rather long time!) is to remove your belay device from your harness, hold it out in front of you when loading or unloading the rope, and then re-clipping it to your belay loop. If you do this, all you need is a moment of fumblefingers and you're going to drop your device, whoops! (Hope you know how to belay / rappel with a Munter hitch or do a carabiner brake rappel . . .)

I'd like to think that most people would learn the correct method on their very first day of climbing, but, based on the embarrassingly long time that I did this wrong myself, and the number of people I still see doing this incorrectly, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

(A possible contributing factor to sloppy technique are the many people learning to climb in rock gyms using Grigris that are more or less permanently attached to the rope, which makes them impossible to drop, or steal.)

(More experienced climbers reading this are probably rolling their eyes at this basic tip, but if you already do this as second nature, feel free to click on to something else . . . )

A better approach: Keep your device (pretty much) connected to your harness when loading and unloading the rope. Yes, with the carabiner gate facing left is shown here, you do need to unclip it from the rope for a brief moment. When you do this you can pay full attention and hold your belay device firmly with your left hand.

Doing this makes it just about impossible to drop.

The demo here is with a Grigri, but the same principle applies for a tube style device.

1. Clip the Grigri to your belay loop.

2. As a right hander, hold the Grigri firmly in your left hand, unclip it from the carabiner for just a moment, slide the top plate up with your left thumb, and then immediately reclip the bottom half of the Grigri to your belay loop. Let go of the Grigri. The bottom plate is securely clipped and the top plate should be hanging free.

3. Now you can load the rope, carefully checking that it's loaded correctly.

4. Once again holding the Grigri firmly in your left hand, unclip it from the carabiner for a moment, slide the top plate down with your left thumb, and then immediately re-clip it to your belay loop.

5. The rope is now loaded correctly, and both holes of the Grigri are clipped to your harness. Ready to climb.

6. Reverse this to unload the rope, as shown in the video below.

A couple of questions/comments I've heard about this method . . .

What about using a keeper cord on the Grigri? Some people find them useful, but I find they get in the way and snag on things. By paying attention and using this technique, you should never need the cord.

What about facing the carabiner gate to the right instead of the left; that way you never really have to take to Grigri completely off the carabiner? That might work for people with superb coordination or who are left handed. As right hander, I always have my belay carabiner gate facing to the left so I can open the carabiner more easily, so that's how I set it up. If it works for you facing right, go for it.

Does the same technique work with a tube style device? Yes. Personally, I use the exact same method: carabiner gate facing left, grip the device firmly with my left hand, open the carabiner gate for just a split second, clip the wire from the device and both rope strands, and then re-clip.

There’s a related method that some people prefer that allows you to keep the wire on your device pretty much on the carabiner the entire time. After loading the rope into your device, you can push the two strands off to the left next to the gate, open the gate, clip the strands, and the wire stays on the carabiner all the time. There is a second or two when the gate is open and you could theoretically fumble it and drop it, but it's very unlikely.

See photos below. You can use your right thumb to hold the wire in place when you open the gate.

To me, both these methods offer a comparable level of security, try each one and see which works best for you. Bigger picture, keep in mind the thing we generally want to avoid: removing your device entirely from your harness and holding it out in front of you to load or unload the rope.

Here's a short video that shows how it's done. Again, the same concept applies to just about any flavor of belay device.