Canyoning Guided Rappel - How much force does it create?

You don't have to lock that off that good. It's just an intro. What am I introing? What are we going to do? Tell the audience what they're going to learn. All right, so I contacted Ryan a while back because we do this technique in canoning called a guided repel. And I've always been really curious about the forces that a system like this will put on the anchors. There's a couple of triplex bolts here that he's tested and I feel pretty confident about. There's a couple of triplex bolts down below that I'm going to put the bottom anchor on. We're going to put a lot of tension on this line and it'll kind of look like a zip line while somebody is repelling. We do this to avoid a major hazard. It's like down here that I don't want Ryan to go into because he's not ready for it. And he'll just be really freaked out and get stuck. And Joe and I really don't want to do a rescue today. So we're going to build this high risk system to keep him out of danger. But I really want to know what's kind of going on with this because we like to talk about these big things and they're needed for these certain situations, but we don't fully understand how much force is being applied. So we're going to find that out. So how long before we should start whirring? With Brent, we'll give it an hour or so. Because if somebody just stays in there for 10 minutes, isn't it just too late anyways? These pockets are there. I didn't find very many yesterday. It was an art. You put your head down, I don't know what a fuse is. Two o'clock in the morning. So what are you doing holding this rope here? Keeping it from getting all tangled up on Brent. Yeah. We got a little premature and threw ropes down and then had to talk about what we were doing and filming here for 10 minutes. And during that time, it got all tangled up. If you can see at the very bottom, the orange and white ropes there, all clustered together. Now we have to take the time to fix it. What's funny is we did a whole demonstration earlier on showing ropes getting stuck. And they didn't get stuck in our demonstration. This is a perfect example of why you don't throw your hands into the water if you can help it. See what happens when you zip line without the guided repel. That looks fun. Maybe I should explain what's going on here. So these are two chains coming to a single point. We use the carabiner to the soft shackle. Soft shackle's nicer to the line scale and it orientates it generally the way I want. But now the screen is facing this way so we can still film it. The soft shackle, the carabiner. Now normally they have it blocked off. So when they pull this, it gets stuck. But because we want to get the force on the load cell, we temporarily club hitched both lines. We have, it was at 1.2 and down there 1.05. And it's already settled to 0.87, 0.85 before Joe actually starts repelling. Now what's your theory? Do you think this will get higher and that'll get lower? Or do you think they'll both go up when you're repelling? They'll both go up. I believe the upper station will have a higher reading than the lower station. That's my theory. And you're repelling on the shoestring? Six mil shoestring. Wow, six mil. What's the core, dyneema? I believe so, yeah. You're hoping so. Yeah, I am. All right, so you're repelling, but your personal anchor's attached to this line pulling you out of the water? Exactly. My short anchor will just ride down this line. So as I repel down, I'll separate from the water flow and the cliff face more and more as I get out here. How much does this normally stretch? You're obviously not gonna be this high. No, it'll sag quite a bit. But out of the water at least? Mostly out of the water, yeah. I'll probably touch that water right there at the lip, but then I'll be out of it. And why do you have a PVC pipe here? Do you plan on doing sprinkler repairs? I plan on filming myself as I go down. It's gonna be super awkward and we'll probably be like just the wrong angle where I'm not quite in view. And wobbling the whole time. Yeah, it'll be worse than a GoPro on the head footage. All right, so I'm gonna keep an eye on this guy, peak force, but also live reading because we wanna see what's going on. And why is he gonna get on there as well? So I'm gonna go down about halfway and then I'm gonna stop and pretend I got my hair stuck in my repel device and I need to be rescued. Do you pretend because you don't have a lot of hair? That's a bald man, phony scenario. I wish I had the hair to get stuck. I don't. So that's my scenario. Then he's gonna actually send up to me and un-**** me, excuse me, untangle me. And then he'll repel down and then I'll repel down. So we'll be double loading this guy. We wanna see how much force that does. All right. In case an actual rescue needs to be performed on a guideline, which will be very interesting. All right, I'll grab the pipe. Popcorn and watch. 1.3, 1.4, 1.7, 2.5, 2.7, 3, 3, let's see a peak. 3.39, interesting. Going down to 2.9 now. 3.3 was the max force. 3.5, 3.7, 3.9, 4 kilonewtons right now. 4.02, 4.07, 4.12, 4.51, current loaded. So we're at two kilonewtons. All right, explain to me how you did your rescue. Well, I want- And what you don't like about it. I want two progress capture devices on the rope when I'm ascending and I want to be connected to both. So I used the micro traction as my main body point. Okay. The first time that I did it, I think it was too long. I had the lanyard and it was too far away. So I want to try with my body more in line with the rope this time, because I was really working my arm strength a lot and not using my legs at all, which is dumb because my legs are a lot bigger muscle. So I'm going to try to see if I can come up with the lines up so high, see if I can get high enough to where I can flip this directly to my harness. That'll put me on really nice. And then I'll use my long lanyard and basic as my second connection point. And then my foot loop can go from there through there. And then I'll do this little caterpillar thing. Yeah. Having this closer, like right there. I think it's going to make a huge difference. Yeah. Huge difference. We'll find out. Okay. So Joe's up there right now. He's going to come down. We're going to redo it all while I keep an eye on this load cell. 2.3. He's in the water. 3.2. Ah. He's higher than I thought. Okay. There's a lot more force on this than I thought. 3.4 is the highest I've seen. 3.5. 3.5. Okay. So why are you doing this? We'll just see in a second. So this is going to be my foot loop. I'm going to try to connect myself to this point. And then this is where I'm going to slide this up and I'm going to step down here and it'll move this up. So I'm going to go up like an inchworm. Cool. But I'm going to see if I can do a Ryan Jenks special move and get my body up there. We'll see. Where are you going to clip it to? Let me see it first. Like, you want to know that before you do a sit up. Yeah, let's go ahead and move some of this out of the way. That's probably smart. If I was smart, I'd do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah. Your ring is fine. All right. So your heel is everything. Yeah. So the problem is, like, you don't even need a second carabiner almost. I think I would do two. Two carabiners is still close enough, I think. Yeah. But that's auto, like, triple auto locking. Annoying. Well, let's see how good you are. Yeah, there you go. Hey, oh, come on. Don't suck. You got this. Oh, good. You got a loop. You got your loop. I got something. Perfect. You slide that up. How's that working? Better? Well, what force you at? Ooh, 3.8. Now, of course, we re-tensioned as we pulled out a lot of this before I came down. 4.2, 4.3. I saw a five. Wow. Five. Oh, wow. 5.07. Pretty high. Interesting. That's exhausting. Fixing problems you cause. To fix a problem that didn't exist. Exactly, yep, yep. He doesn't even have hair and we didn't even realize it. No, no. Oh, you bought that line? That's really hard. I hope I never have to do that and people always do things correctly. Well, then you're in the right.