It’s been twenty years since writing the first edition of Climbing Anchors. The basic aim—through every successive edition—was to fashion a definitive, ongoing resource containing the most relevant information that could make the roped safety system ever more clear, understandable, and reliable to perform in the field. It was always about practical application. The main challenge was to investigate, clarify, and refine basic practices per basic concerns: What constitutes a viable belay anchor? What are the various rigging strategies? How does one best evaluate the dangers and viability of both the components and the system? And so forth. Not surprisingly, while the climbing game continues to evolve, much of the most valuable anchoring information comes from investigating the same basic elements and practices over a period of many years in many settings worldwide. Note that while our conclusions became increasingly refined, the basic concerns are the same.
Total, or “catastrophic anchor failure,” has remained a rare occurrence since technical climbing came to America roughly seventy-five years ago. So rare, in fact, that many believe we should leave off discussions about building even more secure anchors— when most existing ones are overwhelmingly “good enough”—and focus more fruitfully on efficiency and ecology. That is, how best to arrange solid anchors with the least time, equipment, and effort, and how to preserve the rock and the environment in the process. The point is well taken, but simplistic.
As of fifty years ago, climbing anchors were typically built with pitons that were slugged into the rock like 10-penny nails. Said “pegs” were forged from chrome molly (chrome mollybenum) steel, a high-strength steel alloy often used for tools, cars, and planes. They were harder than the densest limestone, rarely failed, and totally demolished the rock. When the climbing world shifted to passive protection devices (circa 1972), such as wired tapers and hexentrics, then finally to the now-ubiquitous camming devices (1978), anchor building became a much subtler art. Anchoring history, and the nuances of modern anchor building, are covered here in great detail. The last few years have made clear a few critical points.
Anecdotal reports strongly suggest that catastrophic anchor failure most often occurs when the individual pieces in a belay anchor were all placed in horizontal cracks. Several recent fatal accidents involved three or even four small to medium camming devices set in grainy, shallow, horizontal cracks. Most likely, direct and sudden loading resulted in oblique vectors—meaning the anchors were suddenly loaded/yanked sideways to the intended direction of pull—and the whole anchor array ripped out.
Because statistically, the majority of climbing accidents occur from leader falls, we’d expect catastrophic anchor failure to result from a leader taking the dreaded Factor 2 ripper right onto the anchor. Not so. Most of these failures involved a leader belaying a second up on a toprope.
As explained later in this book, the fall factor (f) is the ratio of the distance, or height (height = h) a climber falls before the rope begins to stretch, and the rope length (L) available to absorb the energy of the fall. (f = h/L) A fall factor of two is the maximum possible loading in a lead climbing fall, since the length of an arrested ripper cannot exceed two times the length of the rope. What’s more, a Factor 2 fall can normally occur only when a lead climber places no protection and falls past the belayer (double the distance of the rope between them) and directly onto the belay anchor. As soon as the climber clips the rope into protection above the belay—into the so-called Jesus Nut—the distance of the potential fall, as a function of rope length, is lessened, and the fall factor drops below Factor 2. This is why we always rig the system so the top piece in the protection chain absorbs the loading, rather than having it absorbed by the belay anchor.
Returning to our first example—every horizontal crack is not equal. But catastrophic anchor failures show us that special vigilance must be paid to those anchors set in shallow horizontal cracks where oblique loading is a possibility. Cams can and do pivot out of such placements, and if the anchor goes, you’re as good as gone.
Lastly, many guides stress that rock quality is the number one concern in building anchors. This is a concept well understood in engineering and construction, where the quality of materials largely determines structural strength and integrity. If you’re looking to hang a Vermeer on the wall, for example, you don’t pound a nail straight into the sheetrock. You tap around till you find a stud (good wood), lest the nail pulls out once loaded. Same idea with setting anchors in chossy rock. No matter how good the individual placement, scaly, grainy, and fractured rock will blow apart or crumble under heavy loading—like so many sand castles. It is hard to determine exact causes with most anchor failure, but in many cases a perfect storm of bad rock, poor placements, and oblique loading was likely at play. Beware.
My longtime climbing partner and AMGA guide Bob Gaines and I had been fiddling with various versions of the basic cordelette set up for nearly a decade when I first recommended it as a primary rigging strategy in the first Climbing Anchors book (1993). The first cordelette grew out of the practice, seen in Yosemite in the early 1970s, of tying off two fixed pins (often at a rappel point) with one long runner and arranging a power point (aka “master point” or “tie-in point”) by way of a simple overhand knot. This was usually accomplished by using the climbing rope itself. But on a rappel, when you needed a leave-behind sling, sometimes it was accomplished with the fledgling cordelette just described. Because the power point was such a small loop, made by the overhand knot tied in the sling, the rope tended to bind when doubled and pulled through from below, so a carabiner or some kind of ring was sometimes left behind. This configuration, and ones like it, led to experiments and versions that, once thin tech cord became available, eventually led to the cordelette as it exists today. The name is commonly attributed to guide Mark Chauvin, who purportedly filched it from a French source, but no one knows for certain.
Owing to ease and simplicity, I envisioned the cordelette as the go-to rigging device for the majority of climbing anchors. The cordelette also apparently met the increasingly popular SRENE criteria per what constituted a “good enough” belay anchor (SRENE being an acronym for solid, redundant, equalized, and no extension). By the looks of it, the cordelette almost magically equalized two or more pieces in an anchor without the sketchy-looking sliding knots and other more involved setups. By 2000, the cordelette was questionably the favored method of tying off a belay anchor, all across the states and beyond.
Then Jim Ewing at Sterling Ropes ran some drop tests while I was writing the 2006 edition, and we found that the cordelette did not equalize the load between the various anchors in a belay as much as we might have thought, and instead put the bulk of the loading on the shortest arm in the cordelette. This is common sense—that since the shortest arm has the least amount of rope out, it will stretch the least and therefore will bear the most loading, regardless of what material is used to fashion the cordelette. This discovery caused some overreacting, till we realized a few simple facts.
Statistically, there have been very few instances of total anchor failure—always rare to begin with— featuring a cordelette tied off to two or three individual pieces. And the few cases where this was so, the failure most probably occurred owing to primary placements so poor, in rock so crumbly and fractured, that no rigging system would have saved the day. Since this manual is about applied knowledge leading to practical solutions, the following lessons are worth remembering:
The vast majority of belay anchors consist of three or more “good enough” individual anchors that are unlikely to fail so long as they are safely arranged into a power point. The experiences of millions of climbers over the decades have shown that the cordelette remains a viable rigging device for a majority of belay anchors, and in fact is widely used by leading climbers worldwide.
This suggests that A) equalization is overrated as a critical aspect of a belay anchor; B) a typical belay anchor is built with such strong primary placements that rigging is a secondary concern; and C) most climbers arrange the roped safety system to specifically avoid a Factor 2 fall, whereby a leader falls directly onto a belay anchor. Therefore, the instances where an anchor might possibly fail are miniscule. Put differently, we don’t really know, in real-world conditions, how bomber the cordelette is since it is so rarely tested under Factor 2 conditions. What’s likely here is that all three factors just mentioned are at play.
A cursory look at the literature and numerous Internet threads shows us that discussions about these matters are often exhaustive and circular, offering little practical value. Perhaps the best we can say for now is this: Strive to set bombproof primary anchors in good rock. If the anchors are “good enough,” the cordelette remains one of the favored rigging strategies currently used worldwide.
The exceptions, meaning those select instances where a more elaborate rigging strategy is advised, occur when the individual anchors are less than bomber. If you are a weekend warrior sticking to trade routes in popular areas, it is unlikely you’ll run into many bad belays these days. Such belay stations are most often bolted for safety and efficiency. However, if you ever travel to wilderness areas or smaller regional crags, bolts may be lacking altogether, and sketchy anchors are commonly part of the game. Here, one might be pleased to know a few more elaborate rigging systems discussed in this book, such as the equalette. The downside of these systems is they are somewhat more complicated and time consuming to rig than the cordelette. But if one practices here and there, the little extra time spent may pay dividends if the leader unexpectedly rips and slams directly onto a belay consisting of a few wired tapers and picayune TCUs.
Some years ago it became a common concern to beginning climbers that every belay had to be built so you could quickly “escape” the belay anchor if necessary. This was totally erroneous and was the result of two myths: one, the need to quickly escape a belay is a common occurrence, and two, if you should ever need to tie off and rescue a fallen leader, you cannot begin the rescue operation without first escaping the belay. These misconceptions led to the disastrous practice, now abandoned by thinking climbers, of tying into the anchor with either a daisy chain fashioned from nylon webbing or a Personal Anchor System (PAS) made from Dyneema or Spectra. These materials are static and do not absorb any force of the fall, thereby making them dangerous. Personal Anchor Systems made from nylon are a little more dynamic and safer, but the best option is to always use the climbing rope to tie into the master point.
This is not the place to go into the intricacies of self-rescue (see Self-Rescue 2nd edition by David Fasulo in the FalconGuides How to Climb series, which covers the current AMGA best practices), but let it be clearly understood that you should NEVER tie into a belay anchor with a daisy chain, and rapid exit from a belay anchor, if ever needed, is not a factor that should ever influence or cause you to compromise how you arrange a belay or rig to same. These are a few of the basic concerns covered in far greater detail in the text. The rest is application.
JOHN LONG
March 2013