If you do this, DON'T do it wrong!

Picture this. You just slipped. You managed to save yourself from a big fall by grabbing the draw and you look up and it's just friction slab for 45 feet and it's wet. Time to go down. What's the best way to bail off a climb when you know you're in over your head? Texas rope trick? Not the best way. But it is what we're going to talk about today. So what I would normally do in this situation, if I had enough rope, is just go in direct. So I'm safe there. Still on belay. And then I can take this rope with a little bit of slack. Clip it up here. Have my belayer take tight. And once they're tight, I'm on them. And then I'm ready to be lowered. A lot of people have a quick link on their harness for this purpose. Personally, I don't like that very much because it's very easy for that to get bound and stuck and then be hard for the next person when they're leading to remove or utilize. So I think you should leave a carabiner. You can leave a locking one if you want. And it's a little financial reminder for you to plan better next time. If you don't have a carabiner to bail off of, you could use the Texas rope trick. I'm going to show you how it's done and then we'll talk about the limitations and the applications for it. Our context, we're up high. We're trying to get down low. This could be clipped in when you're up high. For the sake of this demonstration, I'm going to be unclipped so it's easier for you all to see. For the Texas rope trick, you need the sling. Thicker the better, but this is a very common sling and your rope. And you'll tie the third strand that goes down to the bottom and then comes back up into one side of the sling. One side here, I've used a poacher's hitch or a scaffold hitch. You could use a carabiner, but then you have a carabiner flying out of the sky at you. And if you have a carabiner, I think you should leave it there. We have three strands here and it's really important to make sure you know which strand is which and that they're managed and they're not tangled. Otherwise, this rope is irretrievably stuck up here or you get a really quick trip down the bottom. Strands one and two are your repel strands. They are through the sling here. And strand three is your pull strand. So you're going to repel on these two strands and then when you get to the bottom, you're going to pull this and then you can pull that. And that's the Texas rope trick. Here are some ways that this can be done wrong. So if you repel on strands two and three, it's going to slowly slip as you go down until the whole thing fails. If instead of pulling strand two, you pull strand one, you're going to fix your rope up there. And if you are up three or four pitches, you're going to have a hard time getting all the way down to the bottom. A big limitation is distance. You only have a third of the length of your rope. So I'm sure some of you have been screaming at your phone this whole time, that hanger is going to damage the sling. And hey, that's definitely a consideration. I'm going to do a little test here with my body weight. Keep in mind that you might have two people on this. This is an old Petzl hanger. Far from the sharpest hanger, I'd say it's somewhere in the middle. So that's my full weight on it. Me sitting on it, about a kilo new. If I do any bouncing or anything else, I think I can probably get two. So I'm multiplying my force there. Really testing the limits of my door here. Take a fall on it. Let's inspect it. We deformed the Dyneema a little bit. Let's see if we can make that go away. It was loaded right about there. You can see a little bit, but I've seen way worse slings that people were still using. I wouldn't be concerned about that. I have been trying to figure out what scenario this would be the best solution for. The only thing I came up with, you're multi-pitch sport climbing, you're several hundred feet off the ground, and you've dropped everything but a sling and your rope. If you can think of another situation, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I love this kind of clever solution. There's been many times in my climbing career that I've been in a little bit hairy situations, and I've thought back to a trick that I learned in an article or out of training, and it's made my day much better. A sling directly connected to a hanger? I don't know how dangerous that is, but I have a way to find out with this new machine in this new lab space I'm in. Now, in a U-shape, a sling should be able to get almost 200% if you just pulled it normal, which is rated for 22 kilonewtons. I definitely don't think you're going to get that pulling over a sharp edge, but we're going to find out. This is my hanger holder. This is the sharpest hanger I could find, and this is a sling in a U-shape connected to this shackle, and these slings were donated by Mr. Nelson, who gave me a whole package of these things, and they are not new, which is going to make this test even more fun. And if you have slings that you can donate for random tests I want to do on a moment's notice, let me know. For example, the rope rescue guy sent me this Texora thing that I'm going to actually use in this test, and then as soon as I'm done filming this, I'm going to break this so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that one. 18.85 is not too bad. I actually may have deformed the hanger doing that, but it definitely cut the sling. What's nice about this setup is this is soft, and this is soft, and this Dyneema, which goes through these pulleys, is also soft, and that allows this machine to be a lot more narrow to fit in the house rather than just in a garage, and so if things go flying, in case I forget to put the catcher on, then I don't have as much of my stuff falling off the walls, I guess. Now what's great about this catcher is I don't actually know how long it needs to be, so this Petzl ASAP right here will go one way, unclick that, and then as soon as something breaks, it locks in place. So I never have to have this compromise the force because this is getting tighter, and never too long in order for that not to hit things. Now I don't want to give the impression that this is safe just because it 18 kilonewtons and you're only putting one or two on. That is in one test. If you repeatedly do that, it could be a problem, or you don't know what you don't know. The other risk is when you have soft things moving on soft things, they cut through each other, and I'm going to try to demonstrate how quick that happens here. I'm trying to give you at least a little gear fear to respect the system at least. I am reusing a sling here with a knot, and I do see some abrasion from the other part that was touching the hanger, but right where I have the rope, it is not too bad even though it has been taken up to 18 kilonewtons. Now I'm going to take this nine millimeter rope, which is pretty rough material. It is pretty stiff, which means it should cut through faster. Dyneema is slippery, and it should not heat up too fast, though Dyneema has a lower melting point. Now if you repel properly on this, and you're going down these two strands, this shouldn't be moving, but if one strand is going through, let's say an ATC, more quickly than the other side, it's going to slowly rub with your body weight on it, and that could cut through this. Let's find out how fast. About one meter strokes. This will count as one. This will count as two. Ready? Okay, this is all pretty hot right now. You can see what's happening to that part. It is cutting through, but I ran out of gas. So that was a super good enough demonstration of the fact that a rope can cut a sling. Now if I had more of my weight on there while moving the rope, it would have cut a lot faster, but just respect the fact that can happen if you're going to start doing some weird niche escape plans, because you're too cheap to leave a carabiner. Now if you like niche repel videos, make sure you go check out our video about the Beal Escaper, where we use it and then brake test it.