Rappelling Hacks

Today we are going to talk about some techniques for repelling that have gotten me out of some hairy situations in the past. Andy Kirk Practors sent us some of these and I think it's just a great resource. This is something that I'm learning stuff from. So we're going to talk about the munter, super munter, and some beaner blocks. I'm Bobby Hutton and I am somewhere not in central Sierra. Now is this central Sierra? This is northern Sierra. What Sierra are we in? First I want to plug this book that I think is pretty cool. Andy Kirk Patrick sent us a couple copies of this. Honestly this is something that I would have bought even if he hadn't sent us this. It's got awesome illustrations all the way through it. Pages and pages and pages of how to descend safely. So I like how he starts this. Repelling should be treated like fighting off a grizzly bear with a spoon as a last resort. If you can walk off then walk off. Such a specific what do you call it analogy. Yeah I really like that because repelling statistically is one of the most dangerous things that you can do in climbing. As I've had recent experience walking off third fourth class terrain can also be pretty dangerous. But we're going to teach you a couple tricks that you can use if you have to repel and your repelling is not going well. So say you drop your repel device. What do you do? So we're going to show you how to do a munter and a super munter. Munter is a good simple way to add friction to the rope with just a single carabiner. So another scenario you did not read the topo very well and you realize that they meant two 70 meter ropes will get you down not 170. The repel is 70 meters not 35 meters. What do you do? And so we're going to show you a beaner block and this allows you to do a single rope repel. You block one side of the rope but you need a cord to pull the other side down. So any paracord you have on you, slings, jackets, take apart your backpack, all of that can be used to pull the other side of the rope down. So we'll talk about that. What the hell is that face? Hi, I'm Mike. I'm going to teach you guys how to repel with an ATC. Rod! I don't have my ATC anymore. What the hell am I going to do? How do I get down from the top of this epic climb I just completed? Well it's a good thing I have an HMS carabiner because we have a lovely munter hitch that we are going to show you. This is real deal though. I've dropped my gris-gris on royal arches and had to wrap with a munter. So this is a really good trick for you to save your ass. So essentially you're going to be tying a clove hitch and not finishing the second loop. I take and I turn toward myself, get the standing line on the opposite side of my loop, pull up and over. I'm going to grab through the middle of that, clip my HMS carabiner through. Now I have a munter hitch. The way I can check my munter hitch is by rolling the knot and if it looks the same on the other side after it's rolled, we know we're in there like swimwear. Another trick for your munter is unlike an ATC, you don't hold your brake stand down. You're going to be holding your brake strand up to keep yourself from going down. Which is a very big difference from an ATC. You got to keep your hands up here to maintain control and to start lowering. You basically lower your hands down toward your body. So you have to be able to lift the weight of the entire rope easily. Yeah essentially you have to be able to exactly. So if you have a shit ton of rope that might be more difficult or say it gets stuck and you can't lift, you could be in a slight predicament. So let's show you guys how to wrap. As with anything in rappelling, we're going to weight it and test it. Make sure it's applying enough friction before we unclip from the anchor. How can you do that since your personal anchor is so short? Maybe you can clip it to the master point. All right now that I'm in the master point, I'll be able to check this much better. Okay the munter looks correct and I'm going to just lower myself down a little bit. Okay so now that the system is good, it's been verified, I can undo my personal anchor and I can start my descent. Are you going to descend or are you going to stay up here with us? I'm going to stay up here with you guys. So we're going to show you a beaner block. So if you have to do a rappel, a full length rappel, you want to get the most length out of your rope. This is a technique you can use. Say you are climbing, I don't know, Calaveras Dome and you did not read the topovariant. Well there were some unclear instructions and they said they were 60 meter rappels and so you climb with one 60 meter rope and then you get to the rappel. You set up your first rappel and realize, oh it only gets you halfway down to the next anchor. And then you remember this trick that somebody had showed you once and tie all your shoelaces, break down all your accessory cord. There was a backpack and a t-shirt involved too and we did get down. We didn't die. So handy trick to know. All right show us this handy trick Mike. All right y'all so it's basically called a beaner block. I carry a quick link with me in case I need to bail or leave gear. It's cheaper and very strong and in the case of the beaner block you essentially have a carabiner attached to a knot of your choice. In this case you have a butterfly or an Alpen butterfly. You could do a figure eight, you could do an overhand. The idea is then you take your carabiner, clip it around your rappel strand or your strand going down and when I rappel on this it's going to chalk against the quick draw here. Okay and if for some reason maybe you don't have a quick link or you have a regular carabiner used here, the carabiner will keep it ultimately from pulling through. So ideally the knot's going to stay on this side but worst case. Worst case this is your almost like your you know last case scenario here to keep it from failing on you. If your knot does pull through, say you had a carabiner here, that might be problematic trying to pull from the carabiner side down. So how do you retrieve your rope if that's what you have? Well so if you're anticipating this you would probably bring yourself a really skinny cord, something that does not weigh a lot. But if you are not anticipating this, well you may want to be grabbing anything you have, i.e. shoelaces, do you have quick draws, any extra runners. Okay and we get this lovely retrieval line going here. Okay so I would take this, we're going to take my lovely retrieval line and I'm going to clip it into that carabiner. Now when I get to the bottom I can pull and recover my rope and then live to do it all over again. So Mike you dropped your ATC for us in a corny way in the last example. How are you going to repel this single strand? So with the single strand a super munter is a really good option especially if you're using alpine cordage, you know something that's in the eight millimeter range. It's not as necessary on something like this which is 9'8", but we're going to imagine for the sake of this that this was a you know eight and a half millimeter alpine cordage. Okay and the idea of the super munter is it basically puts an extra turn in the munter giving you more friction and it actually keeps the rope from twisting because it undoes the twist that it got originally. Another advantage is you get to keep your brake hand going down like you would be repelling with an ATC whereas on a normal munter you would be having to hold your hand up in the brake mode. We're going to cinch down our beaner block. I have my lovely HMS. Okay I'm going to tie my munter first. Okay verify that my munter is rolling. That looks pretty good. Now I need to put the other twist in. Okay so that's going around the back of the strand that is going down to the ground. The opposite of that part? Yes the opposite. So this bend is forward, this bend is going to be facing back. Clip back through and we now have ourselves a super munter and when I go down I hold my brake strand down to lock. Nice and when you rotate it back and forth doesn't it double rotate? Doesn't it have that? Yeah it does a double thing. Yes so the super munter still looks like a super munter. Still looks like it even after it's rolled. Rotate once, rotate twice. Super munter. Cool. Okay so we'll test our system. Yeah. As always I'm still connected into our master point with my personal anchor. Okay now letting the munter roll into its descending orientation and confirmed the super munter is holding. Now release your master or from your master and see you later. To the ground we go. So the beater block in this case is working lovely. The knot is chalked up against the mullion or the quick link there. But that's not the life supporting part that's just for convenience. Yep. All right so Mike is going to do a leg wrap munter mule hold himself in place without his hands trick. So he can add the end of the rope to our extender since he clearly doesn't need all 200 feet of this rope. How's your leg feel? Oh it's great. The super munter's taking 90% of it. Good thing you got a long rope. Good thing. Jesus. So I'm gonna put this little guy in the system. Mike that bowling was so impressive. So fast. Okay y'all so undo my leg wrap and more super muntering. Let's see you pull this rope. Wow that's so good for your quick draws. I'm so excited about the super munter I thought I'd give it a try. So we'll start with the normal one and to properly identify this I'm going to go opposite side of this and then through the carabiner and now we have a super duper munter. But you know what's really neat is that has nothing to do with what this part of the video is about. We're going to set up a saddle bag. This is a saddle more than it is a bag. I don't like saddle bag as a name. We're going to call this the saddle loop. So I'm the saddle there's the loop and I'm going to take this rope and I'm going to flake it basically back and forth so I can manage it so it doesn't get stuck in this perfect scenario I'm in. But in order for this to not get stuck on itself I'm going to do giant loops and then make them progressively smaller. So I'm going to hang on to my saddle loop so it doesn't slip through. So you start at the bottom of the rope and work back up. Really there's two ways to learn. Kinetically what is it kinetically doing it yourself and then teaching. I'm doing both right now. So notice this didn't have a knot. Who knows if it's long enough. Who cares if I have a knot. Now that I have the end of my rope I'm going to feed a loop through my saddle bag loop and I'm going to go back and forth with the rope with progressively smaller loops. But you got to start with the big loop first. That actually feels pretty good. So if I'm holding this it's coming out of my saddle loop here and my loops are progressively smaller and it's coming out the way I need it to. Wow I like super munchers. Let's see if I like the saddle bag thing. Doing great. This is Ryan. Don't be like Ryan. Don't be like Ryan. I lived. That was scary. Don't do the munter, super munter, saddle bag, or beaner block. Don't do that the first time up high. Think about it. Take as long as you need. And uh yeah. Grab a rope. Practice in your living room. Maybe tie it off to the table. Lean backwards. Whatever. Whatever it takes to uh kind of get familiar with it. Play with it in all different variations so you can figure out how to do it right and how you can identify it when it's wrong. I felt like the saddle bag was super good enough. Really keeps the rope just with you if you're going to be in a terrain that's going to get easily stuck. And what's nice about having, I do this when I'm big walling, is I'll do very similar thing as the saddle bag. And I'll have it here or I'll have it here. Because what's nice about having the second beaner, if you're just having a real cluster and someone needs rope now, you just always undo it and give them the few meters that they need. So yeah. Practice, practice, practice. Practice pushing that like button because you're going to do it on the next video you're going to see too. Subscribe. The book Down will be, there'll be a link in the description below for where you can find that on Amazon. I think the call of action here is don't die. Thanks for watching.