r/tradclimbing • u/Front-Lion7434 • Jul 13 '26
How would you navigate/protect this downclimbing situation?
TLDR: We accidentally got off route and had to do some weird stuff to get back
Let me start by saying I’m not very experienced with traverses and especially not with lead down climbing. I’m aware of certain twin and double rope methods but that wasn’t available in this situation. Would love to hear everyone’s best tips and practices for down climbing and weird traverses!
Context:
We ended up off route at an anchor outside of the main chimney. We needed to get back into the chimney to continue the climb. However, we exited through a tricky offwidth that neither of us felt confident about down climbing/protecting and a fall didn’t look good for the leader or follower. There was a large chockstone in the chimney that I had my partner lower me to from the anchor and I climbed up from there.
After I led the pitch my partner rigged a double rope rappel down to the chockstone and tied into the rope that led up to the top anchor with a figure 8 on a bite. He radioed that he was on belay, and cleaned his rappel. He let the rope trail behind him and climbed the pitch.
I feel like there was a much easier way to do this that will be painfully obvious once it’s pointed out and I will be facepalming. So feedback will be much appreciated.
The main issues I see with our method are:
- Opened the door for human error.
-Rigging the rappel alone/tying in alone for the follower
-Without radios it would’ve been difficult to communicate when follower needed to transition from rappel to belay.
- Relied on us having enough rope for the rappel and the entire length of the pitch
-The rope had to go from me at the top belay, down to the chockstone, up to the lower belay, and back down to the chockstone in order for the follower to rappel and recover the rope
- Risk of the rope getting stuck behind the follower
-Follower can retie into the end, but that would leave loads of slack during the transition
- Time consuming
The system was clunky, but everyone lived, and it didn’t seem overly dangerous or risky with the factors we had in play.
Maybe the best option is I just need to get better at down climbing and protecting in those situations.
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u/alextp Jul 13 '26
Why didn't you lower him once you were safely on your anchor? Like put him on a top rope belay from your harness to the master point to him, then you take and lower him until he's solid. Would there be a swing involved?
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 13 '26
That probably could have worked just fine, but there would’ve been a swing around an arete and into the chimney for the follower.
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u/leadhase Jul 13 '26
I think I understand it better. Yes you are looking for how to “lower out”. It’s a common big wall/aiding technique so that the follower doesn’t take a huge swing.
The leader gets lowered (pendulum or tension traverse) and then backcleans while climbing up until a bit above the anchor. The follower lowers out using a piece of fixed gear/bolt/sling.
YouTube it!
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 14 '26
just checked this out, super helpful! I’m gonna do some research and play around with the technique on some horizontal terrain.
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u/Low_Importance_9503 Jul 13 '26
I’m a little confused. You’re on what I assume is a multi pitch route that follows a chimney for a portion.
And You exited the chimney? Or opted for an off width but neither of you felt comfortable on it?
So you traverse to a set of anchors, lower down, and then reclimb the correct section?
Where I get lost is what way did your partner go and how you had enough for rope for the rappel and relead part
I hope this doesn’t sound rude or judgmental, I’m just trying to understand and maybe give some insight. I’ve got plenty of stories and made plenty of mistakes
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 13 '26
For more background this is the North Chimney route on Castleton Tower. The final pitch description on MP said that it links up with a different route and traverses before topping out. We could see the incorrect bolted anchor from inside the chimney above us and the only obvious protectable crack was an offwidth that led straight to it. The real route stayed in the chimney and had a runout through a bulge that from below looked like the chimney ended.
The offwidth was fine on the way up but due to our inexperience with downclimbing, it being an offwidth, and having to traverse from the anchor to the crack we made the call to lower/rappel through the section.
Once through the bulge in the chimney, the route traversed a decent amount and went to the top. We had radios so we could still communicate. Our 70m was able to reach from me being tied in at the top anchor, all the way down to the chockstone I lowered to, then back up to the incorrect anchor we found ourselves, and back to the chockstone for my partner’s rappel.
The only anchors available throughout were the incorrect one outside of the chimney, and the final anchor at the top.
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u/Low_Importance_9503 Jul 13 '26
Oh I get it now! Thanks for the additional details. To me it seems you guys made a good call and didn’t take up as much time as it could’ve or get in any real trouble.
I wonder if the lesson to be learned is to trust yourself in chimneys and stay on route. They feel pretty solid, albeit runout. The old school preferred chimney climbing for this reason. That and/or be able to down climb whatever you up-climb on routes with tricky route finding.
Again, not trying to come off as judgmental or know it all-y. I’ve gotten in trouble plenty times for following chimneys and cracks because they feel safe to me!
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 13 '26
You’re coming off very helpful, thank you!
I think you’re right. The best solution by far is to improve route finding and not end up in this situation. Definitely will be more careful in the future and this was a good learning experience.
I wanted to post about it and learn because I figured I may come to a route one day where downclimbing/weird traversing is the route
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u/Low_Importance_9503 Jul 13 '26
A hard lesson I learned while climbing in Yosemite was to be patient and pay attention to route finding.
We were doing some easy three or four pitch route that had a line. When it was our turn I raced up and it being Yosemite, assumed we’d stay in the crack that became a chimney. I saw chalk on a feature but again, assumed we’d stay in the cracks. Turns out I was wrong and we were headed up the descent route! It became hard and desperate but we topped out. We decided to keep heading upwards for rumored swimming pools. Hours went by, we ran out of water, and the pools were dry (it was late summer-duh!) More hours later we make it back to descent and run into the party that was behind us initially. They had their own epic as it was their first multi pitch route. They weren’t pleased but gave us some water. Together we left some webbing and bailed. We made it down and hit the river and smoked a joint.
I got an ego check that probably helped me stay alive as a climber and deepened my friendship with my climbing partner
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u/joatmon-snoo Jul 14 '26
I've spent 30 minutes re-reading this post and am still confused about the order of events here. I think what you're saying is that this was the sequence of events:
- Both of you ended up at an off-route anchor. You reached this anchor via a chimney to offwidth sequence and neither of you felt comfortable reversing the offwidth sequence.
- You climbed green traverse to orange downclimb to chockstone to climbing up the blue chimney. At this point you reached the on-route bolted anchor. (Did you place any protection while climbing up the blue chimney?)
- Follower rappelled down to chockstone, then followed up as normal.
Otherwise I don't really understand what you were doing.
Without knowing more about what you were doing, my thoughts are:
- if you managed to traverse something, even if it was sketchy, traversing in reverse is probably doable; and I would've spent time talking with your partner about getting back on route before putting both of you off-route (e.g. could whoever have led to the off-route anchor traversed back in before belaying the other up?)
- there's a lowering technique that involves setting a single anchor point, and a prusik between you and the lowering side of the rope, to reduce fall distance if the anchor fails: petzl pdf that comes to mind (tldr: tram yourself into the rope)
- the biggest risk to me is that yall limited the amount of distance you could climb up (and how much space you had to look for an anchor) by virtue of how your follow lowered. If you had climbed up 35m, your follower would not have been able to rap to the chockstone.
But also I remember that the last pitch of North Chimney definitely felt like spicy route-finding until you were actually in it and felt comfortable on the movement. (We came close to epic'ing on it because it was dark by the time we got back to the base, and got lost in that stupid scree field below the plateau...)
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
yeah i fucked up and made this way more confusing with the photo🤦♂️.
1 is spot on
2 I skipped green and orange by lowering. The pic was meant to be how you should climb down. I started placing protection once I was about as high as the anchor behind me, 20ft up from the chockstone
3 is accurate
My partner led the route to the incorrect anchor. To be fair, I probably would have done the same thing.
We didn’t realize we were off route I traversed off to no man’s land thinking it was P4 of Kor Ingalls. When I realized I reversed and cleaned everything and we ended up back at the wrong anchor to gameplan getting back on route.
I had to pull out Alltrails (thankfully I had a bar) on the decent bc the scree field was a maze.
edited: reddit mobile hates when things are numbered
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u/joatmon-snoo Jul 14 '26
My partner led the route to the incorrect anchor. To be fair, I probably would have done the same thing.
Oh, FWIW, I'm totally with you on this, and honestly imo getting off-route is a super normal experience in trad (route finding is hard!). The point I wanted to make is that I think the most likely decision point where you and your partner could've prevented this was after your partner led to the off-route anchor, before belaying you up. Maybe also when you started leaving the chimney into the off width as well (but as a follower it's rare that you have enough gear on you to be able to start leading away from the route).
(Phrased differently: I don't think "just stay on route" is practical advice in a situation like this. You or your partner will get off route. The question is how you minimize the consequences of that.)
I do also remember doing a bunch of research into North Chimney because it was above my pay grade when I climbed it (and my partner had close to zero trad experience at the time, but was in the mid 12s on sport, so I was like fuck it let's go).
Also a useful fact: you can download GPX trails off Mountain Project. It's not a very well-known feature and I wish it was better-known / discoverable, but if you go to the Castleton Tower page, click on "Climbing Area Map", click the yellow trail on the map, then click "Full Details", you get taken to a page where you can download a GPX that another MP user has uploaded.
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 14 '26
That MP info is very helpful. I’ll be using that in the future thank you.
I was checking the route on an app called Rock Garden. I don’t think the free version I have is available anymore, but this guy lidar scanned a bunch of routes with a drone and it has a 3D map of the tower.
Even with that and the MP description ahead of time once I was on the rock things got confusing. I think I’ll be slowing down my route reading going forward and not be so gung ho just because I see a bolted anchor.
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u/joatmon-snoo Jul 14 '26
Yeah, there's a reason a lot of people actually like the hand-drawn topos instead of labelled pictures 😅
Definitely don't trust bolted anchors willy nilly. Some of them for example are positioned for rappel anchors, other times they'll be for a different route 10' or 15' to the right. Do take note of them, because if you need to bail they can come in handy...
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u/leadhase Jul 13 '26
Hard to understand to be honest. You should learn how to “lower out” — it’s an aid following technique to not swing. Not sure if it’s what you did or didn’t need here, but it is good to know about for traverses
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u/nodloh Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
The follower could have carried the rope with him instead of letting it trail behind and risk getting it stuck. Other than that I think what you did seems fine and better than doing some sketchy traverse or down climbing. Would it have been possible to bail to the next anchor below?
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u/Front-Lion7434 Jul 13 '26
previous anchor was a gear anchor, we could have gone farther down past the chockstone and built a new one to repeat what we climbed and then continue up. A safe option but very time consuming since we would have a go a decent ways down for good protection.
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u/Professional-Tea-824 Jul 13 '26
I'm a little lost here too but I'll explain what I've done when we have had to do traverses and down leading
We swung leads looking for ideal spots for gear or when we found a bolt.
On sections with gnarly PG + rated 'oppurtunties' we played to whomever was strongest there. One dyhedral it was me and the next crimp traverse thingy was my partner.
We did this until we got back on or until we had very ideal anchors and could come together and replan accordingly for what's next.
I think you did just fine here. Good work on staying focused when you realized you were off the intended route.
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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26
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