Learn About Anchors for Top Rope Climbing

Learn About Anchors for Top Rope Climbing
Hi! I’m Bill with Zoar Outdoor here on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here today at Chapel Ledges in Ashfield, Massachusetts, trustees of the reservation’s property. In this series we are going to be talking about anchors for top rope rock climbing. So as you can imagine there is a million knots you can use in rock climbing. We’ve already talked about the figure 8 follow through and here in the series about anchors, we are going to talk about a number of others but I will try to keep it limited to our reasonable few; the ones that I find useful. So let me talk about a clove hitch. A clove hitch is a knot that is almost too simple. It is easy to get confused because it is so simple and it is useful because it is very adjustable and quick to tie. So tying it in your hands to clip it in a carabiner will look like this. Throw one loop here, the same loop; slide the second one behind the first one. You see the ends come out of the middle of the knot, and I can clip it in my carabiner and it’s solid and adjustable. If I need to move this along, rope in one end and go out the other end. That’s a clove hitch. You can also tie it around a fixed object like a tree or rock and you would create the same pattern by feeding the rope through those directions. So another knot that is useful especially at the top of the cliff, is a bowline, and there is a number of variations on the theme, but the basic bowline will give you the classic rabbit out of the hole. So here’s the rabbit hole here, here’s the tree behind it. The end comes up, around, behind and feeds back down ending up like that. Now the bowline should be backed up and you should back it up to this side; any sort of quick barrel hitch, half hitch over there will do. So that is a basic bowline. You can get fancier and add a clove hitch to that bowline, so there’s a clove hitch, and then tie my bowline through that, which gives you the added security of two wraps of rope here to keep it from spinning around when you pressure it. So that’s called the Swedish bowline. So a clove hitch is adjustable; a bowline is a nice easily removable hard tie off for the end of a rope.