Two good reasons to mark the middle of your rope
There's two smart reasons to mark the middle of your rope. The first one might be rather obvious, the second one perhaps less so, but it may be more important. Let's have a look at both.
1 - Setting up a rappel
Knowing with certainty that the middle of your rope is at the rap anchor is a Good Thing. Of course, if you cut off the end of your rope for any reason, this middle mark becomes less accurate. But that is pretty darn rare, so a permanent mark on your rope should last you for a long time.
Yes, you can do the trick of measuring hand spans to find the middle of your rope, which actually is pretty darn accurate, but having a middle mark makes it idiot-proof.
2 - Belay Safety
This is one people may not think about right away, but it’s arguably more important. For decades, pretty much everyone climbed with a 50 meter rope, and you would never find a single pitch sport climbing anchor more than 25 meters off the ground. But many newer routes are longer, requiring a 60, 70 or even 80 meter rope. Because these long routes are generally newer, they may not appear in a guidebook, and there's often not a reliable way to tell at the base of the route precisely how long it is.
If you’re belaying the leader, and you notice the middle mark of the rope pass through your belay device before the leader has reached the anchor, that should ring a LOUD alarm bell in your head! You're not going to have enough rope to lower them off and reach the ground, and you need to figure out a crafty solution to a potentially serious problem.
A quick review of the report/book “Accidents in North American Climbing”, published annually by the American Alpine club, can confirm that this is a recurring problem. One likely cause is the increase in the number of routes that require a 70 meter rope, as mentioned previously.
Another contributing factor is probably more gym climbers venturing outside. In a gym, routes are almost always less than 30 meters tall, and therefore the 60 meter rope that many gym climbers have for leading is guaranteed to be long enough.
While many people climbing single pitch routes from the ground don’t bother tying into the end of the rope or even having a stopper knot, doing either of these simple fixes eliminates the problem of potentially dropping your leader when you’re lowering them off.
(Even if you have a 70 meter rope for a route designed for it, if those anchors are close to 35 meters off the ground, and the belayer decide to back up a little bit, that could still cause you to end up short when you’re lowering. So, just having a 70 meter rope doesn’t necessarily eliminate the problem.)
So, how best to mark the middle of your rope?
There's been a L O N G debate on the interwebs about the safety of using things like Sharpie pens and laundry markers to mark the middle. We’re not going to rehash those here.
An excellent choice is to go with a designated rope marker made by the French company Beal, one of the largest rope manufacturers in the world. It’s inexpensive and has a specially formulated ink in a handy dispenser that's designed for climbing ropes. Get one, use it, and share the extra ink with your friends.
Beal rope marker
If you want to make a quick temporary mark, find the middle of your rope and then put some tape on it if you have some. This is a short term solution, because it doesn't pass through a belay device very well and can fall off.
Summary:
If you’re leading a lot of sport routes outside, you probably want a 70 meter rope, which is pretty much the new standard.
Put a middle mark on your rope if it doesn’t have one. Use it to set up rappels and also for belay safety.
Use the generally accepted best practice of a closed rope system. For toproping, this means the belayer is either tied into the end of the rope, has a solid stopper knot tied into the end, or has the end tied to something reasonably heavy like a backpack. to avoid any chance of dropping the leader when lowering.
Think you’d never make a mistake like this? Well, if it can happen to Alex Honnold, it can damn sure happen to you.
In 2016, Alex was dropped by his belayer because they were using a 60 meter rope on a 70 meter route, there was no knot in the end of the rope, and his belayer was not tied to the end of the rope. While she was lowering Alex, the end of the rope zinged through her Grigri and Alex fell onto some “gnarly rocks”.
Would a middle mark have prevented this accident? Hard to say. But it would not have hurt anything.
Read the complete accident account here, from “Accidents in North American Climbing”, an annual publication of the American Alpine Club.
Below is a copy paste.
I had run up the route Godzilla (5.9) to put up a top-rope for my girlfriend and her family. At the last second her parents asked us to hang their rope instead of ours. I didn't think about it, but their rope was a 60m and mine was a 70m. I was climbing in approach shoes and everyone was chatting at the base—super casual, very relaxed. As I was lowering, we ran out of rope a few meters above the ground and my belayer accidentally let the end of the rope run through her brake hand and belay device.
I dropped a few meters onto pretty gnarly rocks, landing on my butt and side and injuring my back a bit (compression fracture of two vertebrae).
Analysis
Lots of things should have been done better—we should have thought about how long the rope was, we should have been paying more attention, we should have had a knot in the end of the rope. I wasn't wearing a helmet and was lucky to not injure my head—had I landed on my head, it probably would have been disastrous. My belayer had been climbing less than a year. Basically, things were all just a bit too lax. (Source: Alex Honnold.)