I'd Rather Be Canyoneering
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I'd Rather Be Canyoneering
Our favorite rigging type = releasable! (Part 2)
Part 2: Learn about twin releasable systems, some aspects to consider with twin releasable systems, and some cautions about releasable systems in general.
Resources:
Totem rigging and releasing video from Rock Exotica
Jester rigging options Facebook photo from @totemrigging
Jester rigging video from North Wash Outdoors
Joker Mickey rigging variations on RopeWiki
Hey everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Katie
Carma:and I'm Carma and you're listening to, I'd rather be canyoneering.
Katie:We're best friends who totally geek out about canyon rigging and beautifully slot canyons. Basically we'd always rather be canyoneering. But when we can't, we spend every spare minute, we have talking about it.
Carma:This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please seek professional instruction and practice technical skills in a controlled environment before entering slot canyons. Your safety is entirely your own responsibility.
Katie:Welcome to our canyon crew! In our last episode we talked about single strand releasable systems. Now, some of you might be wondering if there's a way to rig releasable, but also use both strands of rope for repelling. The answer is yes. this is twin releasable systems.
Carma:This is something that you could do if you need to keep the group moving quickly. for example, You may want to use a twin releasable system. If it's getting late, there's bad weather coming, or if you want to move the group through a cold section faster, it allows people to go down on either side of the rope, utilizing both strands for repelling. Someone can be loading on one strand while someone else is repelling on the other strand. If the repel has enough space and the anchor is strong enough, you can even have two people repelling at the same time.
Katie:In the static rigging world, twin systems might be built by using a stone knot to isolate both strands of a double strand setup. If the stone knot's familiar to you, you may be able to picture this already. So for a twin releasable system, you take the concept of the stone knot and add a releasable component. we'll be sharing some of our favorite twin releasable systems in this episode, and remember that you can find links to videos and other resources in the show notes and on our Facebook page when you're done listening, The first twin releasable system that we learned was the gesture, and we learned this on a totem. You can actually do it on a number of other devices as well, like the Kong Gigi or the Sterling at s basically anything with a double stitch plate. We chose the gesture because it looked really familiar to us when we were looking through all the different kinds of releasable systems. It looks a lot like an ATC and guide mode for a top belay. And so coming from the climbing world, we gravitated towards this one. In order to set up the gesture, you'll need some sort of a stitch plate device and two carabiners. You run your rope through the quick link at the anchor so that both strands of the rope reach all the way to the ground. It looks like you're setting up double strand technique, but it's not. to finish turning it into a gesture. You clip a carabiner to the webbing right next to the quick link. And when you do this, you clip the rope too. Then you use that same carabiner to attach the stitch plate device to the anchor. Last, you'll pull up two strands of rope and put a bite from each of the strands through the stitch plate and clip them off with a second carabiner. We prefer the second carabiner to be a round stock carabiner because the two strands of rope that go through the stitch plate are going to run around the spine of that carabiner when you release and lower. So it's nicer on the rope not to hit a hard edge of like the 3D type carabiners.
Carma:What we like about the Jester is that we find it easy to rig and easy to inspect. It also requires less gear than the Joker, which is the other option we're going to talk about next. The jester has a little bit more friction than the Joker, and in order to release and lower on a jester, you have to pull out some slack between the stitch plate and the anchor, and then kind of feed it through the stitch plate. That can be kind of difficult. Katie actually learned a great hack for that though. If you want it to lower a little faster and smoother, you can clip another carabiner onto the slack and loop and help it slide a little better.
Katie:I also like that cuz then my hand isn't just right in that loop. My one hand is on the carabiner and one hand is still my break hand, but I'm prote. It from, if it were to go tight, I don't crush my hand.
Carma:Good call.
Katie:Now we're gonna talk about the Joker. It's the other twin releasable system that we wanna share with you today. The Joker can be rigged on a totem as well. If you take the totem from its vertical position and turn it to a horizontal position, then you're ready to rig the joker. A joker can also be rigged on two figure eight descenders. And that makes it pretty cool because if you're sharing gear in the group, then you can, pass that around. To rig it, you simply take the two descenders and overlap the big opening on each of them and clip those big holes with a carabiner up to the anchor, you'll have the two big holes overlapping and the two horns sticking out to the left and right. Next. You grab a bite of rope from the left hand side and pull it through both large holes on the figure eights, and then pull it up and over the horn on the left hand side. You do the same thing with the right hand side of the rope. Take a bite of rope from the right hand side. And pull it through both big holes of the figure eight devices, and then over the horn on the right hand side to safety off the setup clip both the horns with a locking quick draw. People sometimes call the joker a mickey because it looks like a Mickey mouse when it's rigged. This. The joker's a little more nuanced than the gesture and it's set up. It's a little tricky because you have to attach the carabiner to the anchor in a certain way so that the rope sits on top of the carabiner and doesn't get pitched underneath it. If that happens, you won't be able to release the system. For that reason, you see a lot of variations on the Joker Mickey. Some people will click the carabiner to the webbing and mirror the quick link to avoid any pinching at all. Other people will add a second carabiner to that setup to help correct the orientation. Still others will use a locking quick draw to add space and fix the orientation problem at the same time. I think that's pretty cool. All of these are great solutions and it's your choice based on what gear you carry and what your particular situation.
Carma:The biggest benefit for the Joker is that it's smoother to release than the jester. You unclip the quick draw and actually take the rope off of one side of the setup. So this creates less friction for when you're lowering, so you can do things a little smoother.
Katie:Twin releasable systems have some special considerations. The twin releasable systems that we just told you about, rely on counterweight to stay fixed. So when someone gets off at the bottom, you need to make sure that there's still counterweight at the top. We usually just assign an anchor manager at the top on these to be handing ropes to the next person, do load and go, things like that. Um, and with their hands on those two ropes, they're just making sure that there's no slippage through the anchor. If one side gets it's unweighted as someone's getting off.
Carma:If you are only sending one person down at a time and your anchor manager wants to be hands free, you do have the option to tie a knot on the opposite side from the repeller to prevent the rope from slipping through the totem. In our experience with the jester, it doesn't slip very often. We've only seen it happen once. and it was when the anchor was very low to the ground, so the totem was situated in a more horizontal position rather than a more vertical hanging position. Our friend on repel did a jump to clear the edge of an overhang. Katie was manning the system and reacted immediately, but the rope still slipped a few inches through the totem. It definitely started our friend on repel, and it surprised us how much more effort it took for the belay in that horizontal position because we had just never seen it happen before.
Katie:Yeah, it surprised him and it surprised. another consideration with these twin releasable systems is that the last person is gonna have to convert that gesture or joker into something else before going down the repel, because you don't wanna leave all that gear at the top.
Carma:Yeah, you can't pull the rope down when it's rigged in either a jester or joker because both strands of the rope are going through the setup. So that last person has to take it off. And we found one of the reasons why we like the jester so much is because it's super easy as the last person down to unclip the totem from the anchor and flip that over to your harness and just go down on throttle mode. At this point, when the last person is going down, there's really no more advantage to releasable rigging cuz there's nobody at the top to release it for them. And by going down on a stitch plate device, that last person is cleaning out all of the twists that the other repellers have put into the rope by using figure eight descenders like critters. The stitch plates actually help clean it up. And help to prevent the ropes from getting stuck when you go to pull them. so we really do like the jester when we're willing to carry a totem, Something we should note here too is that while these twin systems allow two people to be on rope at the same time, you can only release a twin system with one person on the rope. You need to have one strand free in order to lower. If two people are on rappel at the same time and one of them gets stuck, then the other repeller would need to finish the rappel and get off rope before the stuck repeller can be lowered.
Katie:to finish out the topic of releasable rigging in general and touching back on our, part one as well, we just wanna talk about some overall considerations and cautions for releasable rigging. The first thing we wanna talk about is do you have a way to communicate with the person who's on repel? So this is gonna go for both our releasable blocks and the releasable twin systems that we just talked about. If you don't know why they. exercise. Some caution before you go straight to lowering. You have no idea if they're already solving a problem on their own, like doing a self rescue and they're depending on the rope to hold still. You also don't know if lowering them could cause an injury or make a bad situation worse. For example, if you lower someone whose foot is stuck, you'll most likely make things worse. You need to know if there's a reason that they stop too. Like maybe there's a rattlesnake at the bottom of a pothole or there's a pool filled with logs that they don't wanna go into. So don't assume and just jump straight to releasing.
Carma:It would be super scary to be suddenly lowered on repel if you didn't expect it to Like you, you would initially think you were just falling.
Katie:Something broke like.
Carma:right? Yeah. Especially when releasing a block because when you release the lock off, there's some slack that needs to be quickly pulled out of the system. So ideally you're gonna warn the person on rope that they're going to feel the rope pop when that happens. Cuz if they're already in a stressful situation, having the rope move like that is probably gonna make them panic.
Katie:It really could. And ideally the person who's on rappel can lock off their device before you start lowering them so that they can use their hands to navigate things on their way down or, they just have more options that way. So being able to communicate, is really key. So you don't make a bad situation
Carma:Right. Another thing you wanna consider when you're setting up a releasable rigging system is how far do you need to be able to lower someone? So the ideal situation when rigging releasable is to have one rope that is double the length of the repel or longer. That way you have half or more than half of the rope in reserve at the top, and you could potentially lower someone from anywhere on the repel all the way to the ground. In reality, we know that that doesn't always happen like often in canyons. We need to tie two ropes together or tie a rope in a pool cord together to be able to have both ends of our system reach the ground and be retrievable. So if you're tying a pull cord onto one side, you don't have as much space to lower someone.
Katie:You wanna know how far you have until you reach the knot that you tied, because that knot is not gonna pass through the rigging. So you wanna think about that ahead of time or put the knot on the other side and make sure that is a safe knot for load bearing, holding the full weight of a person, kind of a knot basically what we're saying is that it really depends on how far you need to lower someone. some options here are that you want to lower them all the way to the bottom of the repel. Maybe their hair is caught in the device, maybe their glove got sucked into the device and their whole hand is crunched up in there and you just wanna lower them all the way at the bottom. Or maybe you just wanna lower'em to a shelf where they can fix the problem themself. Or maybe you, threw down another rope and you're gonna go ahead and switch their weight over to that other rope. It really just kinda depends on what your game plan is and, you know, before you even send down the first person how much you have in.
Carma:Right. And you really don't need that. Length to be able to shift someone over. So it still is worth rigging, releaseable, even if you can't lower someone all the way to the ground. Now, An example of a time when we had to figure out how to deal with the knot when we wanted to rig a releasable system was when we did Mystery Canyon in Zion. When we got to the mystery springs repel, we wanted to be able to rig releasable and to be able to lower someone all the way down if we needed to. We had a mixed group of canyon years from beginner to advanced, and we just wanted to have that option. So the mystery springs repel is about 200 feet.
Katie:But I didn't wanna carry a 400 foot rope. I death protest
Carma:too heavy and too much money. So we needed to tie two 200 foot ropes together in order to make this happen. And we had to put the knot on the repel side of the releasable system. That meant that the pull side was completely clean so that we could use the pull side to belay someone and lower them all the way to the bottom if we needed to. And the knot was right up next to the ring so everyone could easily get on rappel below the knot and have a clean ride all the way down on the rappel side as well. Like Katie said, if you're going to do that, you need to make sure that the knot that you are using is one that is safe to repel on. And also that the second rope that you're using is also a reparable rope because it will be holding the full weight of a person and you need to have like a thicker repel rope running through your releasable system. It won't work. The friction won't work the same way if you're trying to use a pull cord in a releasable system.
Katie:And that's it for today,
Carma:we've covered a lot of ground today. tell. Tell us what we learned, Katie.
Katie:All right, so we're gonna do a little summary just cuz we have gone through a lot here. We've talked about several different releasable setups in the releasable blocks category. We covered our favorite releasable blocks, including the compact secure eight block and the E M O or the eight mule overhand. In the twin releasable categories, we've covered the gesture, which can be done with anything with a stitch plate, but a lot of times it's the totem gesture that's pretty popular. And the Joker, which can be done with a totem device or a couple of figure eight descenders. These are all great options under the right circumstances. I'd say it really just depends on the Canyon geography and the needs of your group. The conditions. It's one of those skills that we think is really essential for a Canyon leader to know so that you have options.
Carma:when you know how to rig releasable, you can really be prepared to simply and efficiently deal with the situation if one of your buddies gets stuck on repel, if you need to adjust the rope length on the fly, or if you need to slip the rope over a sharp edge. So when you are trying to decide what setup you wanna use, just know that there are a lot of releasable options out there. You can go and research these options that we've talked about to learn more about how to rig them and how to safely release them. They are more complex than just the static rigging options we talked about last time. So it's best if you have more than one person on your team who knows how to use them and how to inspect your rigging and yeah,
Katie:when Karma and I were trying to expand from just knowing how to rig releasable on the gesture and trying to add in figure eight blocks, there were so many confusing things out there that I didn't rig that releasable rig for a group for over a year until I absolutely knew that it was perfect and I could confirm it with a picture and that karma could check that same picture and make sure that we are completely safe before we sent any friends down over on it.
Carma:Yeah. And you wanna make sure to practice releasing your setup before you actually go in a canyon and have to use it on another human in an emergency. You don't want that to be the first time that you ever release someone. You want to be comfortable knowing how it feels to release the system safely, and how the friction setting feels as you're lowering so that you can stay in control when you do that.
Katie:You don't want any surprises, uh, when you're doing something like that. And I started just in the basement with a 12 pound weight, and then I moved to my ring setup over in our carport and worked with some friends, you know, three feet off the ground.
Carma:yeah, definitely wanna learn it in a controlled environment. If there's something that you love that we haven't listed here, share it with us. So we are nerds, right? We're gonna go look up any rigging that someone's gonna tell us about So if there's something that you love and you're using it all the time and it's working great out there, let us know. Cuz we love to learn new ways to.
Katie:yeah. Share a picture on our Facebook page. Come talk to us, we're gonna be keeping the trolls off and try to keep it a fun atmosphere of just actual learning and people sharing ideas.
Carma:If you're totally hooked on canyoneering like us, remember to subscribe, so you don't miss any episodes and you can also reach out to us on Facebook. with questions, comments, topics you wanna talk about, or just to say, Hey, cuz We would love to hear from you. Thanks for dropping in with us and we'll catch you on the wrap side.
