ABC

Ironically, in light of my last post on the risk matrix, I came close to abseiling off the end of my climbing rope yesterday. Just as my feet touched down, I noticed that my brake hand was very near the end of one strand of rope. Once I unweighted the rope, the short strand hung about a metre off the ground. With my weight on the rope and a good amount of rope stretch (dynamic ropes stretch about 18%), I still had a metre of rope in my hand when I reached the ground, but that is skating a little too close to the edge for me.

A risk matrix would not have prevented this near serious accident, but a mental check-list would. However, mental check-lists only work if you actually run through the mental check-list in your mind before you cast off from the anchor. A simple mental checklist for abseiling is A, B, C. Is the Anchor bomber? Is your Belay device correctly threaded and attached to the belay loop? Finally, is your Carabiner aligned along the spine with the gate closed and locked?

I checked all these things, and, as I always do, I weighted the abseil before removing my PAS from the anchor, and checked everything again with weight on the rope. At a sport climbing crag in Canada, I once narrowly caught a beginner climber about to abseil off a climb with only one strand of rope threaded through the belay device. That would have been a quick trip to the bottom of the crag.

Setting up the abseil, I thought I had pulled through plenty of rope to have a good amount from both ends on the ground but I could not see the base of the crag from where I stood on the ledge (it's a steep wall). One strand of rope was still clipped through a draw on the crag which distorted my view of how much rope I had pulled up and lowered. I thought about putting a simple prussic or safety on the rope as a back-up, but I usually don't do that for straight forward one pitch abseils when it is just as easy to simply wrap the rope around your leg if you need to be hands free. A prussic would help a bit, but it is still possible to abseil off the end of the rope with a prussic safety on.

Of course, tying a knot in both ends, or even knotting both ends of the rope together would have been a good idea and would prevent me abseiling off the end of the rope although I would need some way to climb back up the ropes to equalise them (I had a sling and prussic cord on me so I could have rigged something to achieve that) if I found one end did not reach the ground.

Classically, it was the end of what was starting to feel like a long, tiring and hot day on a wall that was a wee bit toasty in the sun and I was thirsty, weary, half dreading the steep walk out, and thinking about all the gear that had to be retrieved. All the hallmarks of an accident waiting to happen.