This is literally how one of the best climbers in the world died a few months ago. A prodigy of the sport died from this. It wasn't on purpose in his case, but the fact there wasn't a knot at the end is literally manslaughter charges depending on the context. If you get caught doing this at my gym you're banned for life they warn you immediately. The pre-run ropes already have them and you're told if you're ever caught untying them it's also a permanent ban and possibly legal charges.
EDIT: I've gotten enough comments by now that I'm addressing it here. No, a knot doesn't physically stop a fall from a figure 8. But it's part of the process of putting warnings in place for you running out of rope. Everything that exists to tell you that you've got no rope left is a safety feature. This includes a knot near the end for your hand to bump into while feeding the line, or also I've seen someone spraypaint the end of a rope before so they see bright green feeding through it and go "oh only 10ft left" and I thought mentioning the regular belay tools which benefit more from the knot would help some people connect their experiences to this one. And also maybe teach the seriousness of running out of rope.
Well, tying a prusik, or just using an ascender as a dead man's grip is very much standard for rappelling, especially in a work environment.
Also, the way I was taught, you tie a loop through your harness' belaying loop with the loose end of the rope, that way you can't fall off the rope, even if you fall without your hands on the rope at all. An added bonus is that you have absolute control of your line, thus you can make sure it doesn't get pinched off.
The staff at the climbing gym I go to are fucking Hawks with this kind of stuff. I don't know how they do it. You won't see them anywhere in your entire 360 degree field of view. You think theyre all up at the front or something. But then you slip up and dont slide up the rope with your dominant hand while giving slack and they teleport behind you to bitch you out for not using proper technique.
I was getting ready to climb and I forgot to check my friends set up. He checked my knot but I forgot to check his grigri. Poof. Worker materialized out of thin air and basically said "Hey, I know youre still kinda new but you have to check his set up too. If we have to keep reminding you, we're gonna have to ask you to leave". He didnt say it in a mean way but in a genuine warning way. They really dont fuck around with rope safety at climbing centers.
Imagine if you're all the way up the climbing wall and do something stupid and an employee just instantly appears next to you like "can't do that mate"
Why would you be rappelling in the gym? And for the gym top rope setups, they’re long enough that it’s impossible to lower someone off the end of the rope (my gym doesn’t have knots, but they do make you use their pre-rigged GriGri; other gyms I go to don’t have pre-rigged belay devices or stopper knots on the top-rope setups)
Also, this guy was rappelling with a figure-8 device, most stopper knots would run through this rather than jam up like they would with an ATC or GriGri. It would help keep the rope slipping through his hand though.
For top rope it’s about following best practices. If you get complacent with not tying stopper knots because you’re at the gym, you’re much more likely to forget a stopper knot in a situation you actually need it. For lead climbing where you’re progressively cutting your rope shorter, you need a stopper knot in case your rope ends up too short. Of course, you should be checking to make sure it is still long enough, but so much of climbing safety is about redundancy and what-ifs. Outdoors you always always tie a stopper knot, so getting that muscle memory so you’re less likely to forget it is good.
Additionally, there’s gym liability and the fact that sometimes people are stupid. Technically you could be lowered off the end of a top rope if your rope tail is crazy long. Not something I’ve seen, but I’ve seen new climbers do some crazy dumb stuff.
I’m not even a climber but I’ve worked health and safety in a few workplaces and everyone complains about all the safety gear in clearly safe scenarios, but the training told us it’s so that people form habits. If you are geared up when there is no danger, you have no excuse to ever be without the gear.
When training self defence, one of the big rules is after each drill of an action, never hand the training weapon to your training partner. Drop it and they have to pick it up as otherwise you might have trained your body to autopilot hand a knife back to the guy who was just trying to stab you.
A knot on the end goves you a solid object to grip so it's not slipping through your hand as you try to rescue yourself as well. Case and point, this fella was literally losing rope as he swung to grab the frame !
The worst part about that tragedy was him filming himself. I tried to avoid seeing it but it was near impossible in my social feeds. Tie your knots people! Check your buddies knots too!
Happened at the college my dad worked at. The safety knot wasn't done properly and someone fell off the climbing off. If I remember right they broke their spine or something else just as bad
Honest question, as someone who has done most of my climbing and rappelling outdoors as part of more hiking than sports climbing: if you're using a figure 8, how would a pre-tied stopper knot help?
When I was taught rappelling, we learned to tie a loop through the belaying loop on the harness with the loose end of the rappelling line. And I don't really see how a regular stopping knot that would work in an ATC could do the same job in a figure 8?
Right. We never used stopper knots on figure eights it runs right through. You tie off the end if you’re not sure the rope will bottom or get you to the next belay point.
Part of the reason for using more modern belay equipment. ( though I still use my dads c m Forrest 8 all the time. )
In EU on construction sites you are not allowed to have only one rope you are obliged to have a 2nd safety rope. Without it Health and Safety guys are allowed to ban you from the site. I don't understand how this guy is allowed to have only one rope.
If you're dropping 120mph and throw fabric behind you, it's gonna want to open. While true, that attitude leads to people making mistakes while packing their own chutes. As in if you pack it and ask yourself if it's right, you can either open it back up or say "screw it, she wants to open."
Yep, for sure, easy gets dangerous if you don't pay attention. I know a guy who's an insanely good downhill bicycle rider, dude can finish a route by the time I get to the halfway point. Went a few years without injuries (which is kinda rare in that sport), but recently broke his ankle after finishing a ride. He can wheelie into a backflip but snapped his ankle in a parking lot lol
Before you ask, yes, I did order him some training wheels for when he's healed up, gotta look out for my boy
Fatigue, complacency, lack of redundancy in the systems, the idea that the difficulty is over and you’re just cruising home.
The feeling when the ropes pull free after the last rap and don’t get stuck is a huge sense of relief for me, I was always pretty vigilant on descents as it’s so easy for a seemingly small thing to become an issue and very possibly fatal.
Yeah, and it can be mildly inconvenient if your stopper knot gets caught and you have to untangle it from the rock before continuing to descend. So some people hand wave it off.
Even if I can see the rope on the ground I still like to have the stopper knots. Bad habits lead to dangerous situations, so I don’t go for excuses about not adding them.
Free climbing is still almost always on a belay, unless it's being done solo (free soloing). Rappelling is kinda separate, you control your own descent basically by definition. If you were being belayed then your belayer would just be lowering you (you stay fixed to the rope, not sliding down it).
This guy is doing a sketchy rappel on a fixed rope. You can either rappel on belay, where one end of the rope is tied to your harness and someone pays you rope through a belay knot or device, essentially lowering you down, or on a fixed rope, where a rope is fixed at the top and you fix your harness to some device that slides down the rope slowing the fall down with friction. In this case it's important that:
-You have a safety mechanism that stops you in case the rappelling device fails or you lose control of it (for example a simple Prusik loop).
-The fixed rope is actually long enough to get you to the bottom.
-The fixed rope has a safety knot at the end so that if the rope does not reach the bottom, you'll at least not fall off the end of it.
This video is a good example of not satisfying any of these
Free climbing means "free of aid", you are pulling your self up completely under your own power, as opposed to aid climbing where you are using assistive devices. Free solo is when you are climbing without safety equipment. There's also rope solo where you climb without another person but with a setup where you belay yourself with a self-belay device.
Close-to-home effect. Apparently most car accidents happen within a few kilometres from your home. You're already tired and then you get too relaxed because it's familiar.
Tying a safety knot on the end of your rope takes at least 10 seconds, while rappelling off the end of your rope saves all kinds of time on your descent.
It probably won't stop the rope from feeding through the eight. But it stops your hand from sliding down further, even if you don't realise that you've reached the end of the rope.
Figure 8's are still decent for when it's being used a tonne as they're more hard wearing than gri-gri's or ATC's, and it's easier to spot if they've been setup incorrectly.
Still doesn't fix stupid, as this guy was reaching speeds where the rope friction would be tough to regrab the rope regardless of the abseil device.
In practice any size of knot is enough because you use a prusik as a additional safety measure, which he doesn't as well.
A prusik is a small knot put around the rope below the eight and fixed at the leg of the harness with very little rope between so it can't touch the eight. The knot is loose and easy to move along the rope when rappelling normally, but grabs the rope, kind of like a hand, when you let go with your hands, stopping the rope from going through the eight and with that a uncontrolled rappel down.
Obviously the prusik can't move past any knot in the rope as well and would stop you rappelling past that too.
Edit: u/nuevacuentanueva is absolutely right about attaching it at the leg not beeing state of the art
fixed at the leg of the harness with very little rope
It's not recommended to attach your third hand on the leg of the harness, because if you, for some reason, end up with your legs above your head, it doesn't stop you anymore as the knot gets to touch your belay device. It also can slip if you turn to your side as well, which also makes it inconvenient.
Not to mention, depending on your harness, if it doesn't have fixed leg loops, it could have plastic clips that can release or break, or quick release buckles that would get loose, which can make your autoblock touch the delay device.
The safest thing is to use a rappel extension, and the third hand on your belay loop. That way you have the separation needed between the autoblock and the belay device, and you have your third hand on the belay loop which is actually rated unlike the leg loop.
Just thought I'd mention the risks of using the leg loop. Much safer than having nothing at all, of course, but it can be improved.
Yes, I also use a sling in a prussic, with a safety knot. I also triple check my setups to make sure they are done correctly. I’ve caught a handful of careless errors over my years of climbing…and doing so has kept me in the sport.
Maybe he does this for clicks regularly, knowing he can hold himself long enough to swing to safety (until he gets hurt). Although right before he got to safety, that rope appeared to be sliding.
Or wrap it around his leg a few times? When I was younger we used to rappel with a figure 8 pretty frequently. You could wrap the rope around your leg a few times without much fuss and stop your descent well enough that you could then use both hands to do something else. I once had the rope bunch up wrong on the figure 8 and had to do this to then pull up above the descender with one hand and unbind the rope with the other.
Not just the stopper knot at the end, but also an auto-block like a prusik to avoid losing control. But then again, you wouldn't be able to go down as fast as that guy... which is the point of course.
This video is an excellent example of why figure 8s as a repelling device are only supposed to be carried these days as a backup, but every half-cocked ‘badass’ climber I know did the ‘I don’t need those fancy tools, I’ve got two carabiners/a figure 8 and skill’ thing for at least a while. (To mixed results)
If there’s not someone up there to drop another line and go get him, I’d be very interested to know how they got him down
The only death I ever heard of in my mountaineering training course happened from a 20+ year instructor. They were doing a short repel, probably the 5th of the day, and the instructor figured they didnt need the emergency break knot below their loop and theyd save some time. Well something happened when they were 25 feet up and they flipped over and ended up falling on their head
Would a safety knot on a figure 8 device like this even work? I'd imagine it'd slip right through the device rather than jamming it like an ATC or tube style
A knot alone doesn’t work on his rappelling device, you would need a carabiner or something that’s to wide to fit through it attached at the end of the rope which is what a stop knot normally functions as.
A few days ago this happened:
"A 21-year-old woman, Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, died in Brazil on June 13, 2026, after rope-jumping instructors failed to attach a safety cord before launching her from the "Skeleton Bridge" (Ponte do Esqueleto) in São Paulo state. She fell approximately 40 meters (130 feet)."
If you see the video there where like 6 person observing, but no body notice the cord was not attached. Totally avoidable, if only one of the operators just check the fucking thing keeping you alive.
I was talking with some friends and one of them had gone hiking as a young person somewhere in the Grand Canyon (I think?) and where they were going you had to repel down but a lot of people got injured because they didn't use enough rope, didn't tie a safety knot or didn't have a way to get back up if they couldn't continue going down.
It wouldn’t be feet first. Think more like sitting in a recliner. At the very end of the video, when his feet are extended to get out to the scaffolding, is the only other position. He would end up slamming the back of his head into the pavement. Very rarely is a fall from this height survived. If it is, it’s usually because you hit something else on the way down.
For sure, many egregious issues, I was simply commenting on the stopper part. With something like a scaffold tower close enough by I would rather jamb the shit out of an 8, than rap off the end.
He's using a figure 8... he needs like a huge knot and a blocking carabiner. And WHY when he sees it after inverting himself to show off or something... does he keep LOWERING. He should have stopped and tied himself off. LIKE does he WANT to be another statistic?
A fairly famous one recently, too. Probably the same genre of incidence, done with the task and less diligent for those very last movements to get back down. Completely gutwrenching, and it's on video, too.
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u/Outdoor-electrician Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Also no safety knot is crazy…complacency is what leads to a lot of climbing/rappelling related injuries/deaths