3 Ways to Build a Top Rope Climbing Anchor

If you'd like to know how to top rope anchor, clip two strong things together, don't forget to take a picture for Instagram. We'll go into more depth than that. We'll show you three official ways because three makes for a great title. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to Botswana, Africa. Actually, it's United States, North America is where we are. We are going to talk about three top rope anchors and Bobby's really good at that. Before we get started, just click the like and subscribe button right now. Before we get started, you can always click them again to change your mind later. If you don't like the video, take it away. So specifically top ropes with two bolts. So top roping is where there's an anchor at the top. The rope goes up to the anchor and down to the climber. Climber climbs up to the anchor. You can either set up a top rope by lead climbing up to it or like we're doing today, just walking to the top, setting up the anchor. So there's four things that I think are really important when you're considering a anchor, any anchor, and then we'll talk about some things that modify those four things. So strong, we don't want our anchor to break. We want to be able to understand how strong it needs to be. How do we know if our gear is strong, Bobby? Some people test it. Should we break test stuff in slow motion so people know? Climbing gear is strong. If you buy rated climbing gear, good to go. The second thing. That's one finger. The second thing is solid. So we want to make sure our everything, in addition to being strong, is also solid. So it's not going to move. So bolts, we want to make sure they're in the rock well. If we're anchoring to rocks or trees like highliners sometimes do, we want to make sure those aren't going to fall over or move. This is embedded in the rock right here. If this bolt was poorly placed into a small boulder and it's moving while you're top roping, don't. Not solid. And then secure. So we want to make sure our rope doesn't come out. Of our anchor setup. And the other, the fourth thing is redundant. So we want to make sure that if any one thing were to fail, it wouldn't kill us. Except, of course, the rope or your belay device. Except all the single points of failure. Yeah. Well, the channel slogan is Breaking Gear Fear. So let's show you a couple clips of ropes breaking 10 times stronger than you'll ever, ever put on at top roping. So some things to modify those things with. Ideally, you want it to share the load between your two bolts. And not putting too much weight on one bolt versus the other. Ideally, you'd want it to be efficient. So I could make a super strong anchor if I brought steel cables out here and 12 millimeter manual repeats. But that's not very efficient because I would have to carry a ton of weight. And that it's expensive and I could do it overkill. There's ways to do it a lot lighter, a lot cheaper, and a lot more efficiently. Just as safe. And what's the other consideration? Because it sounds like you're doing troll patrol for the comment section. A little bit. So angle is another consideration. So we are going to make the anchor come in from the bolts into a central master point. And we want to keep that angle less than 90 degrees. We have a video right here where we tested American Death Triangle. And we tested a bunch of angles and how the greater the angle, the more obtuse it is, the more it can multiply the forces on your bolt. And there's no reason to put multiply force on your anchor if you don't have to. So keep it less than 90 degrees. Another consideration is we are using bolts that are pre-set. So they're not usually three feet apart from each other. And in this case, it's going to be pretty hard not to have a good angle. Yeah. You want to show us how to do it? Or should I show you how not to do it? I just thought of a way to screw this up. I've been thinking the whole time on how to screw this up. Let me show you. So this is completely how not to do it real quick. In case you were tempted to just throw some carabiners onto a bolt, you definitely don't want to go in one. And if you think, oh, well, I'll go in two. Let me get under my personal anchor. You have a couple things wrong with this besides these not being locked. Is the rope is going to be rubbing over this rock. It's going through the two carabiners are getting smashed on here. They're not orientated well. And you're being so far apart that you're actually creating a twist in your rope because it's going through two points that are parallel and separated. We have anchor videos and stuff that cover like why you wouldn't want that. This is the worst way I could think to build this anchor. Now, these bolts are not designed to have carabiners directly to them. Sometimes you'll see bolts already with big hooks permanently attached to them. And they come and they'll touch. They have a good angle. They're obviously strong. And they're not rubbing your rope on the rock everywhere. So that's not what this case is. So show us how to do it right. All right. So we're going to talk about some of the materials that we'll use. So this is a carabiner. This is designed for climbing. This is a D shape. Do I have the D right there or should it be over here? Anyway, you get the idea. So this has cool little ratings on it of the minimum breaking strength of this in different angles. We'll just say shortly it's all good enough. I like to use these locking carabiners when I'm making an anchor. Because if there's any movement, rope movement, it's out of sight. It's way more secure if they're locking. With these twist gates, see it twists. It's on the gate. I set these up so they twist down. If they're like this and there's a lot of vibration or movement, it could untwist and then less secure. So I put these on the bolts. And then I like to use these pear shaped carabiners or HMS carabiners for the rope side, the master point where the rope is going to be rubbing. Because the D shaped ones when you opposite and oppose them like so, so it's more secure if you have one thing unscrew this and unclip it. It's not going to do it both. So opposite and oppose. But when you do that with the D shaped, it creates a pinch point here, which creates more friction that you don't need. Where you do that with these pear shaped beaners, there's a really wide rope bearing surface right there, which is less stress on your rope. So you'll notice there's a little size difference. And you would think that these are stronger than these. They're actually not. These are rated major access for 25 kilonewtons and these major access for 24. And that's to do with how they place the load. In some instances, clipped to a bolt, the load may shift out here and be a lot weaker. So I generally don't use these HMS carabiners for my anchor bolts. It puts too much force on the gate side. You're losing all the benefit. Yeah. If the anchor were to do this, if this were to slide over, this is quite a bit weaker than if it's on this side. In a top rope scenario, is it going to be weak enough to break? Probably not, but it's something to keep in mind. So to connect our bolts to our master point and then the rope, we use a variety of different materials. This is seven millimeter cordelette nylon polyamide. Pretty standard. You can buy this at most gear shops. This is a Dyneema sling. It's rated for climbing. This is rated 22 kilonewtons when it's new. Dyneema is a lot lighter and less bulky, but it doesn't last as long. Make sure you're buying gear that's rated for climbing because there is a testing process that goes into that. There's oversight all with the intention of making sure it doesn't break when you need it. So before we do any anchors, I am going to teach you knots. And actually, I'm just going to teach you one knot. Keep it real simple. But is it the best knot, Bobby? It's the most simple knot and it's good enough. Super good enough. It's your simple overhand. If you can do this, you can do any of the anchors that we are going to do today. Most of these anchors will need a loop of some sort with your slings. They already come in a sewn loop. It's pretty cool. But if you buy some nylon accessory cord off the spool at your gear store, it's separate. So to join it, I use an overhand bend. And a lot of people are going to say, well, they're stronger bends. And that's true. But we did some testing of the quad anchor. And this bend was one of the last things to fail. So it's strong enough. When you're tying this, make sure you have a lot of tail because when it gets pulled, it can roll. And then just tighten up all the strands. And then we have a loop. So I've put these locking carabiners into the anchor. This is my personal anchor. So if I slip, I don't go all the way down. So we'll clip this Dyneema sling in here. Lock it down toward the climb. So you might think that clipping in your carabiners like this, making sure they're opposite and opposed, looks like a pretty good anchor. The issue with this, besides this not being redundant if it were to be cut, is if the bolt fails or this carabiner fails, the rope pulls and the whole system fails. And everybody's down at the bottom of the cliff, and some are more injured than others. So there's a simple way to fix that. Take it out here and then put a twist in there, which creates an X. So this is a sliding X. Has a lot of advantages. One, it automatically load shares if the rope were to move around. Big disadvantage, this is not redundant. If this gets cut anywhere from the rubbing or a rockfall, I've seen that happen a lot, your whole anchor fails. So there's a couple ways to deal with that. One is to use two slings. I don't love that because if you have a rock strike on your anchor webbing, it's going to cut everything that's there. Another way to do it using overhands is a limited sliding X. So you tie overhands. All right, so did we edit the part with me fiddling? This has all the advantages. It's self-equalizing, automatically load sharing. If this were to be cut, this carabiner were to fail, our system is still going to be intact. So this is not my favorite anchor, but it works. Let me show you a second way. As it's set up, a couple different redundancy problems, but we can fix them. If we use our favorite knot, an overhand, we can go through here and we've fixed all our redundancy issues. So if it were to be cut here, we still have this leg that is separated and the whole thing won't fail. The one consideration here is that you have to be intentional about setting it up for sharing load on the bolts. It would be pretty easy to have one leg of the anchor that was way shorter than the other, and that would be seeing all the load while the other leg is loose. With modern, well-installed bolts, I really don't feel that's a big deal, especially on loads you're seeing in top roping, but it sure looks better when it's done properly. This is our third method. It uses four strands. This is a very long Dyneema runner, 240 centimeters, I believe, and I've just doubled it over. And to make the quad, I'm going to use two overhands. You know how to do that at this point. Yeah, and I'm going to keep them loose for now because I inevitably end up moving them. And something that you'll find that I am making look easy right now is this little tag or the knot in your accessory cord is always going to be in the way. You'll need to move it. So we've got two overhand knots there that we can move a little bit, and then we're going to hook it up to the bolts. So clipped into bolts, I have clipped my carabiner in one carabiner into two strands over here and the other into the other two. I've got all sorts of redundancy going on here. We've tested this exact setup with other slings, probably from the same exact batch, and we got something like 40 kilonewtons. In this setup, this anchor has a lot of advantages, and this is the one I normally use. It's automatically load sharing. Say the climber is traversing, the load can shift from anchor to anchor. We've got lots of strength, way more strength than you'll ever need, 10 to 20 times more than you'll ever need. For a top rope anchor, this is the one that I use most of the time. It's not the perfect tool for everything, but it's a good tool for a lot of things. Ryan thinks that three is good for the algorithm. I don't care. I'm going to show you a bonus way that I see a lot. It's not something I use very often, but we're going to talk about it because it's really common. Two quickdraws. You can buy them just like this. These, of course, are rated by Rated Gear. And you clip them to the anchor. And, of course, you want the gates opposite and opposed. So the same thing is not going to compromise both gates. Say there was a crystal here, it's not going to open both gates. A couple of issues with this. One, it doesn't load share very well if the bolts aren't perfectly horizontal. The angle is not great if the bolts aren't quite close together. The bolts are more than six to eight inches apart. Angle gets pretty big. You're multiplying the load. And they're not as secure because these are not locking carabiners. And for something that you're going to clip and walk away from, and you have the movement of the rope, I like locking carabiners for security. Let's top rope. Even if you're not repelling, you want to make sure all of the rope gets down to the bottom. Otherwise, you have to come back up here and fix it. Make sure you have the middle. Some ropes have really nice middle markers. I don't trust that this one does. So I have found both ends. And I am going to find the middle. Cue time lapse. So I found the middle. During that time lapse, I made sure nobody was down there. If I suspected anybody was down there, I would yell rope, which is universal for look out, something's going to hit you on the head. So we found the middle. We are going to clip it into our anchor here. We are just going to review everything and check everything before we're done. So these are locked. Once we have this loaded, these are screwed down. Screw down so you don't screw up. Same with these. Thank you, Ryan. And we have a well set up quad here. Wood whip. All right, we're going to go climb now. If any of that was scary or didn't make sense, please give my friends in the guiding industry some employment. They'd be happy to work with you through any and all climbing techniques. I'm sure Ryan wants me to say subscribe or push the like button. You can if you want to. Cheers.