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Summary: Use the shape of a boulder to your benefit and learn how to tie a knot to various sized boulders when top rope rock climbing in this free video series.
Views: 2,492 | Tags: tips, how, to, mountain, gear, equipment, sports, rock, outdoors, climbing, rope, knots, rockclimbing
About the Expert
Bill Killough-Hill Bill Killough-Hill has been teaching rock climbing at Zoar Outdoor since 1995. He is an AMGA certified top rope site manager and keeps fit climbing with stude... read more
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Questions & AnswersHi! I’m Bill with Zoar Outdoor here on behalf of expertvillage.com. We are here today at Chapel Ledges in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the trustees of the reservation property. In this series we are going to be talking about anchors for top rope rock climbing; tying your anchor material to your anchors at the top of the cliff. We are going to talk about boulders. We need to think about the shape of the boulder and what is going to happen when we tie to it. So this particular boulder is very easy to tie off to because it is huge with a slot behind it where the rope can’t get out of. So a simple bowline tie off to this will do it; that can’t come off of there. Now what if it were more complicated? We need to think about do we want another wrap? What happens if we put another wrap on this? Well now when I pull on these this piece of rope is going to squeeze the boulder so if I had a more slippery shape boulder that had a groove that I wanted to keep the material in, then that would hold it there. If I had a cone shaped boulder, squeezing it wouldn’t be good because then it would want to pop off the top. So in that case the first option with the simple loop to pull down would work. Other options that you might want to consider are with webbing. You might want to use a simple half-inch system. As you come over the top that’s adjustable. If I’ve got enough friction back there, then I can simply tie this up with half inches and with enough friction around the boulder, there is virtually no tension on this knot whatsoever. I’ve got to tie more than this but for the sake of demonstration, you can see that that is going to hold just because of the friction for that period of the rope around the rock; more wraps, more friction and that’s another principal to work on there. So it depends on the shape of the boulder, get it so that your material won’t come up over the top, find a place where it fits and where it will stay and use a tying system that will give you the best chances of keeping your rope where it is.
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