Safety Season with our Self Rescue Course
What will you do if your partner can’t pull through the crux, several pitches up a route? What will you do if you drop your belay device? This past weekend we hosted one of our regular self rescue seminars to teach climbers how to deal with the unexpected during a climb. Our guide Ray Hughes went over the basics of anchor building, rappelling, escaping a belay, ascending, and much more. He tailored our course to the level of experience of the students. This full-day self rescue course is designed to teach the skills necessary to manage the unexpected during a climb. Accidents can happen in the mountains and self-sufficiency is essential to having safer outdoor adventures.
Just a few skills we go over in our course:
- Proper anchor building
- Escaping a belay by securing your climbing partner to an independent anchor
- Ascending ropes
- Creating mechanical advantage systems using your climbing rope
- Lowering a climber with a secure back-up
- Improvised belaying-techniques
- Which gear to have on your harness and how to improvise with it
- Which gear not to use and why
- Decision-making in the vertical environment
- Friction hitches for multiple applications
- Rappel back-ups
- Hauling systems
- Anchor transitions
Check out more about the course here.
