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Comments sought on natural anchor design 1-Aug-2012 At 12:54:37 AM pmonks

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On 31/07/2012 muki wrote:
>well this comment is prety uninformed if you think about all the climbing
>gyms worldwide that run top ropes for beginners using static rope systems

I have never seen a climbing gym that used static rope for the main climbing rope, and I've been in quite a few gyms in my time, in quite a few countries. I wouldn't climb on a static rope in a gym either.

>calling BS because you want to protect beginners while admitting you've
>only been doing solo set ups for less than a year is also a bit comical,

FYI I've been climbing for almost 20 years, and was caving and (to a lesser degree) canyoning for another 10 years or so before that - it's only top rope soloing that I'm new to.

I'm finding it rather strange that you're not asking about the anchors - should I assume you think they're irrelevant, or that you're actually human and made the (understandable) mistake of overlooking other potential problem areas? I think we probably agree that the quality (or not) of the anchors would be a factor in whether the energy dissipation differences between a static and a dynamic rope might contribute to an overall system failure.

>One of the main dangers is if they were to make the mistakes you yourself
>say you made on the slab in a previous post, ie slack rope being allowed
>to enter the system.

Sure, but you're still missing the point that the dynamic rope gave me a wider margin of error in that situation than a static rope would have.

At the risk of repeating myself: this isn't a single variable game, and the more variables you can stack in your favour (particularly when you're learning something new, as I am right now), the better. It's not going to make things 100% safe, but improving the margin by any amount is worthwhile.