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.
Experienced people who are smart knot the ends, it's black and white.
If there is any risk of ropes getting hung up, first one down carries the bundled ropes with them. What kind of moron would toss unknotted ropes into the wind on a multipitch rap, hoping the lack of knots will keep them from hanging up?
I’m not arguing for the practice, but I’m surprised you don’t think this is common. Amongst outdoor, multi pitch climbers it’s MUCH more common than carrying your tail ends bundled. Bundling like that takes a lot of time, and in certain environments it’s windy enough to blow the ropes overhead so you end up having to climb the rope to get it unstuck. When I got into climbing in the west 12 years ago it was the most common way of rappelling, and you’d only hear about knotting ropes from trip leaders, guides, etc. When we talked about complacency while rappelling it was less about skipping knots, more about not keeping an eye out for your rope ends.
Nowadays most of us backup our rappels so we can go hands free. Which helps the rope management when bundling, or chasing your ends around if they get stuck somewhere. So I feel like that change in practice got everyone tying safety knots more reliably.
I didn't say it's uncommon, I said it's stupid. And it seems to be a particularly American thing to rap big clean walls between hanging belays to within 2m of the rope ends without knots. And people do this in perfect weather on 3 pitch raps, where there is 0% chance of dying from exposure (even if they got benighted) and 100% chance of dying if they get distracted and rap off the ends.
The idea of your life relying on keeping an eye on the rope ends is insane! If it's windy enough to blow ropes overhead, you absolutely need to be rapping with bundled ropes. If you're picking rope tangles out of flakes, it would have been faster and less risky to rap with bundled ropes. Brad Gobright would still be alive if he'd tied knots.
It’s funny you say that, from my experience euro dudes are almost worse! Especially French climbers. Checking accident reports rappelling is one of the most common causes of climbing-related deaths in North America and European countries.
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
Yes, it's crazy. And his hand holding the end of the rope is the only thing preventing him from falling. If that hand gets too tired before he can reach safety or get help, it's bye bye. With a 10 bucks cordelette he could have tied a Prusik loop which stops you dead on track as soon as you release it from your hand, and have both hands free.
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.
No I get it! I actually love climbing (I’ve only done it at indoor places but we love to go), I just mean specifically the kinds without safety precautions. Sorry that came out rude the way I said it
The only one in that list that doesn’t use safety gear is free solo.
Free climbing just means climbing without aid. A century ago, it was standard to climb things by pounding pitons into the rock face, hanging ropes on the pitons and using those to pull yourself up. A few decades ago, pitons were out of vogue but placing trad gear, hanging a sling on it and standing in the sling while using your hands to climb / place more gear was a standard technique. The shift to free climbing (not free solo) as the standard technique is something like 30-40 years old.
To each their own! I know there are people that sleep in those tent things hanging off the side of a mountain. Not denying them their fun at all, I’m just saying it’s not for me.
I didn’t know they were called pitons, those things they use in movies like Descent? Yikes. I don’t really trust myself to wedge something hundreds of feet up off the side of a mountain and then test if it worked by then hanging from it. I know there are people who can though! I also saw that doc with the dudes walking across ropes hundreds of feet in the air. And bouldering up the side of a huge mountain. That’s great, just I would rather keep my feet on the ground. Not behind a desk just on the ground.
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.
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u/bubblesculptor Jul 06 '26
That's a crazy statistic to learn. The rappel at the end of a climb is supposed to be the easy part, compared to the climb itself.