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Diary
of an aspiring alpinist 1
Feb 2004 Climb
Adventure Climbing Centre Ropework session I Tangled
Up Today
we came to the disturbing realisation that we were not all that savvy
with ascended or descending a fixed rope to save ourselves.
"Ok,
use your prussik cords to go up these ropes, with ATC as a backup!"
Roz commanded. Er...(fiddle fiddle) okay, I know I need one long prussik
for one foot to step in, and another shorter one for one hand, but how
short is short? We
had all at some time or other, read or learnt about the prussik (or the
variation - kleimheist)
knot from courses or climbing manuals. But can we confidently rig a
couple up in a moment's notice? It
took us several long minutes of experimenting - trying to recall those
drawings in the climbing manuals that we'd read - before we got the
basic ascending set-up right. Long minutes of hesitation that could have
serious consequences in a real-life climbing emergency.
Coach Roz throws us an imaginary scenario. "Right, now you are prussiking your way up. What if you have to abseil down?" Murmurs of uncertainty - do you take out the prussiks? Which one to remove first? Oops, do I need to change the prussik around? Yikes, did I even learn how to do this? The
simple solution, as Coach smugly demonstrated, was to just weight the
ATC / belay device by taking in all the slack, loosen both prussik knots
and abseil down, gently sliding the loosened prussiks along. We could read all about elaborate rope set-ups and systems, but if we didn't know what to do in a climbing emergency situation, all that textbook knowledge would be useless. So this was a wake-up call to return to first principles and making our theoretical knowledge work for us, instead of tripping us up in real-life. CT
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the
peak
getting into shape diary of an aspiring alpinist |
an alpine skills development project
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Lay Hoon, Sham and Cathy having their prussiking practice at Climb Adventure climbing gym. |
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