Doug Robinson shows us How NOT 2 rappel

We're rappelling today so we thought we'd make a video. We're going to show you all sorts of ways to do it and maybe some ways not to do it and of course we'll throw a load sale on there for you guys. Why not? This is my my friend Doug. Doug how long you been climbing? 62 years. It'll be 63 in October if I make it that far. How long you been guiding? 50 years. I'd have to count. I can't count any longer. So I have a certification from this organization called American Mountain Guide Association. Doug do you have a certification from the American Mountain Guide Association? Well sort of. They grandfathered me in because I'm an old fart. Did you have anything to do Short version is that I was the first president of the American Mountain Guide Association. There you go. Hi I'm Doug and I'm going to show you how not to rappel. If I can remember this. What is this called? It's called the Australian rappel. Normally I have more respect for Aussies but but I think I don't know I wouldn't want it named after me I'll tell you that. So what is the purpose of this? The purpose of this is just to demonstrate how not to rappel. I mean I saw it in a book once and it seemed so silly that I had to try it but so I've never actually rappelled this way and I haven't even tried it in decades. I had to figure out how to wrap it around my arms. So you would only use this on terrain that the cameraman doesn't have to be tied in to film you rappelling? Let's show people how to actually rappel. I wouldn't use this on any terrain ever. Hi I'm Bobby I'm going to show you how to actually rappel. Bobby you're rappelling terrain that is fourth class. Are you uh scared of fourth class now? Just a little bit. Is this your first time being on fourth class since? It is my first day out climbing. All right I won't tease you too much for using a rope on something that I'm standing on with nothing. So you're going down to the bolts down here and then we're gonna show people how different setups go. Yeah. All right let's do it. So the first thing we're going to do is a two strand rappel. So we're using one rope it's doubled over. This is always an essential part of your rappelling setup. We're gonna show you the forces of stuff on low angle rappels like we have here. We started feeding it through here. Normally we'd feed it through these rappel rings right there. Because this is how you retrieve the rope is you pull one side down when you're done. Exactly yeah you pull one side down when you're done. So I tied stopper knots in the bottom to stop me if I get to the end of the rope before I get to the next anchor. Before you realize you're at the end of the rope. Before I realize I'm at the end of the rope. I think you should always consider tying stopper knots. There are situations where they might get stuck in stuff as you're going down. Like say they get stuck in something way off route and you have to go fix that. There are ways to mitigate that like saying saddlebags where you keep the rope with you the whole time. So I've tied stopper knots into both ends and we're going to feed the rope through until we get to the middle. And then we're going to rappel. I'd like to interrupt this program with our sponsor today safety. Recently when I was in Yosemite there was somebody who rappelled. They were tired, did not tie a stopper knot and fell off the end of the rope. I almost fell off the end of my rope before and I've heard of numerous things of it happening to people. So rappelling is actually one of the scariest things that I do and I was just with a bunch of my highline friends in Sweden and they also said the scariest thing they do is rappelling. In theory there's less redundancy even though we're going to show you like the forces aren't high but if you make a mistake it's not just about the strength of stuff but you using it. Be smart. This is a very serious part of climbing or going down things or canyoneering whatever you're doing. Rappelling is a super serious risky activity and we want you to take it super serious. So we are actually showing you proper techniques. We're something to add. If you can avoid rappelling by walk off probably do that. Walking off third and fourth class terrain also dangerous though. Really? I would rappel over some of your fourth class experiences. Yeah. Being outside is dangerous. Period. Be mindful of what you're doing and pay attention to the things we show you in this video so you can stay safe. And that's all we had for our sponsor today. Thank you safety. So we had a little hiccup that I wanted to use as a teaching experience. So we threaded it through and we couldn't find the middle marker on this rope. I'm not positive that it has a middle marker. Many ropes do have a middle marker so you know where the middle of the rope is so your ends aren't even. You don't go off one end. The trick to find the middle you grab both ends. Both ends have knots. And then you start from there and you feed it through. Are sharpies safe for ropes? Oh it feels like you're teasing an episode. Oh that's not been requested a million times. So I'm getting close to the middle and... Oh there is a marker! That's fairly... you can see it better on camera than you can see it in real life. Oh it's true. Notice that I am tethered into the anchor here. This is important for rappelling to have a tether. Now to not confuse you none of this is going to exist in your rappels. This is going to go through the reins. Okay what's the next step? So we hook up our repel device. What's your repel device today? So this is an ATC Guide. It is brand new as you can tell. Has almost no wear on it. This is a well-used device. So this is kind of the old school unbacked up way that I'm showing you. This is something a lot of people use including myself on occasion. And we'll show you this and then we'll show you a way that has some backups. Okay so the teeth side get the loose strands. The anchor side is up here. And you just want to make sure you're locked in I'm into my belay loop. When we're rappelling we're going to keep at least one hand on the brake strand when we're on repel. Here I'm still clipped into this so I mean I can go hands-free. But I'm going to grab on brake. I'm going to test my repel before I go off of the anchor. Like that's solid. All right so you want to make sure this is working before you undo this. Yeah. All right. Gloves are helpful especially if your hand has been in a cast for the last three months and all your skin is brand new. Okay. So we can take ourselves off the anchor and basically we weight it and then let it slide through our hands. And you want to make sure that you get your hair caught in here or your finger. Or your beard. Or your beard. That's never happened to me before. More than like three times. Because then you can't go down or up. Yep. What does unprotected mean? The other method has a friction hitch either below or above. And that way if you let go it stops you. Is that you letting go? Because I still saw you hanging on. Hey we have a video on friction hitches right here. There you go. But more towards the corner. Oh no over here. Yeah okay. How much do you weigh Bobby? Uh actually pretty much one kilonewton. I was at the for my surgery they weighed me at 224. Oh my gosh you are one kilonewton. All right let's see because right now you're putting on 0.27 leaning backwards. Yeah. All right so repel out of frame so this looks really cool. Okay. Guess the force. Bobby thinks it's 0.5. 1.01. Yeah. It's nice to communicate with the people you're with that you're off repel so I can get on. Now he did only max out at 1.01 kilonewtons. And I have a couple options here. I have the same uh alpine guide belay device he has. But I have a Beal Birdie and a Grigri. And we've actually tested all these in other videos which is kind of cool. But when you're doing a double rope repel you kind of have to have an ATC. I mean there are alternatives. But you can't really use a Grigri on one strand or you're gonna slip through. Fun fact if you are new to climbing. So that's why there's two holes in an ATC. For this exact reason. You look safe. You have a rope in your hand. All right so peak force on and I'm hanging on and filming while I repel because that's safe. How are you using your left hand and hanging on Ryan? Well I use an ATC. Alpine guide apparently is very skinny making this very hard. I'm already at 0.32. I need to go on a diet man. All right so it's important when I repel to not kick rocks onto Bobby. What's my peak force? 0.7. 0.7. This is pretty low angle. It's not something I would want to walk down but I probably could actually. Are you filming me filming you? Oh wow look. I hear there has to be knots getting stuck. No way. What are the chances? Weird. This is gonna be like... So the idea is I don't let go of this before clipping in and then I tighten it up. Double check that I did it wrong. Make sure you have good rope management. Tighten. Test. Relax. Test. And go off which is a lie because I actually haven't taken it off. But what I like to do is I take a lot of slack out of the system especially when it's hot and I don't want to touch it right away. He has enough slack to actually start putting it in his repel device. So by the time he pulls the rope up I go. You don't want to just let go of your ropes if you just repelled at an angle and you need to get to your ropes. Assuming there's not another person coming down. Anyways be mindful of the knots dropping rocks on people. Mostly them on us and where your ropes are going to be and what you're going to do next. Think about what you're going to do next. Super important. What are we going to do next? You pull the rope through while two more people are falling down with you. They're on their own rope. So we're going to pull our rope down because we're we are done with it now. I pull the knot out of this which is super important and when I pull this thing I let it go through my fingers and I double check with somebody. Right? Good? Yep. Okay. Then while it's still within reach I stop for just a moment and I go huh no knot. That's good because it's just really sucks to climb 517s to try to get back up to uh you know 20 feet above you climbing the tree next to the rock trying to like get it back so you can uh get home at 3 a.m on leaning tower. That's never happened to me. Now ideally you would do the next repel and thread it through the next thing and you don't want to cut your personal anchors. That would be called a nylon saw. So this rope since it's going to go down I'm going to tie my stopper knot now because I like stopper knots. Brought to you by Safety. So we want to stop at the halfway marker which is clearly marked on this thing. Does that little smudge the marker? There should be two smudges. Yeah that's not right there. Not sponsored by Mahmood because I think their middle marker sucks. All right so if I pull this down on top of me it's going to end up falling on this side directly on my personal anchor. So let's just get out of the way of the system and go wow wow I called that one wrong. Oh look it's cutting your rope too. Cool. Way off on that. Anyways you want to protect your single-pointed connection to the rock. Sorry Bobby. So I'm using my glove and not Bobby's sling to pull the rope over. I just pulled this end of the rope up so I could do my favorite thing. Stopper knots. Brought to you by Safety. So what are we doing with this repel? So this one we will undo everything you've done now and do a double rope repel because sometimes you need two ropes to get to the next repel station. This is why filming something takes twice as long to do anything we're trying to do. Doug's on his way down. Are you filming Doug's lack of knots? Well I'm going to let him get tethered in safe before I question him about it. Well okay. How are you able to do that hands-free? Oh look at this. Safety. Safety's right. Well sort of safety. Backup safety. Yeah well this is actually a really good example of where knots would have been a great idea in the rope. I wish that I had tied one before I came down. I'll tell you a story where the where the center mark on the rope was in the wrong place and the guy decked. Oh oh center markers are probably not helpful if they're not in the center. There's all kinds of stuff that can happen. Isn't that just called a marker if it's not in the center? Normally we assume it's in the center. You know what assume smells? It's in life in general. It's the assumptions that get every time. Like assuming it would be warm today. Right. All right so what's our next repel style we're teaching? Okay we want two ropes here to be able to get to the next anchor. That's handy. So we're going to tie the two ropes together and keep the knot up near the top. We'll talk more about that later. But two ends here. I'm gonna leave a nice long and more tail on this than I usually do when I'm tying in for instance. See that? This is useful for what got unfortunately named the European Deck Knot. That's because people probably didn't have tails long enough when they did it. Yeah maybe so. What do you call this? I don't know what name did we decide to use for this video? Flat overhand. Yeah so this is a flat overhand knot. It's particularly good for being able to pull down because the knot stays away from the rock and won't catch on things. And that's one of the huge problems with rappelling is when you're pulling down your ropes you get it stuck and all kinds of uh we don't take a whole video to go into that. You don't want your rope stuck. Bad stuff can happen when your rope hangs up you're pulling it down and you need 12 more wraps to get to the ground. So where does this knot go? Do we just? Oh the knot yeah good question. The basic stuff. The knot goes. Well do we know how long this rope is? Yeah I matched it to a 70. Okay so it's 70 and that's a 70. So it's nice to know that our ropes are the same length and similar size is important for the European Safety Knot. All right so you pull the knot up. So yeah the knot can actually go right against the anchor. And then we have a knot at the end of this one. Doesn't matter. Let's do uh hold on. How strong is this? Let's go find out real quick. Let me just teleport to Lodi real quick. Tails are slipped in and the knot has... Cool! That's so cool! Yes! Whoa this thing is so glazed. It's like sticky. Wow that's hard. Well apparently this is super sketchy if you're repelling at 20 kilonewtons. Let's go back. Wow that was interesting. I came back. So let's continue repelling. All right how do you do this? Okay see I'm flipped into the anchor here so well I'm a guide so I can't say the word safe but you know what I'm talking about. I have my backup safety system and I'm tying a Pressek knot on the rope. We thank Baron von Pressek for inventing this really cool knot which will slide up and down the rope very easily but not too easily. If you pull on the knot it tightens and it grabs on the rope and it'll hold hundreds of pounds. We actually might have a video right about here on that topic. We could teleport to Lodi and find out. We already did. A quick credit trailer but I hear rope on rope abrasion is bad. Why is this okay? That's a great question. This is okay because you go slow enough to not heat it up. Mylon melts at a pretty low temperature. Not as low as Dyneema. That's right. Bingo! So don't use Dyneema. I actually do use Dyneema but I wrap slowly. We are rappelling slowly right now so I have to pee. To speed up our process here I will make a kink in both loops of the rope and then using the two slots in my belay device which now is conveniently double dutying as my rappel device the loops go through. Very important they clip into the carabiner and the carabiner locks. No joke. It doesn't lock itself. It needs to be in the carabiner. So I think we all have stories here. This is creating friction and I'm going to use friction to slow myself down because we're talking about wrapping slowly here. That is how you test your rappel system. Not clipped in. But I have my safety back up. It's true. Okay so now I have safety back up wrapped which is basically just a friction device and loosen my back up a little pull it down. So don't lower that and just lower yourself. Let's see this in action. Okay so if I start here what's happening? Oh my prusik knot grabbed. And how hard is it to release after you have tension on there? If this was overhanging it would be hard to release but it's not. I can actually just push with one finger on the loop part here. Loosen it and it comes down. Magic. All right so you keep your hand here. My uphill hand is going to be on the rope anyway so it just cradles the knot and I pull it down as I go. My other hand is feeding the rope into my braking device and down we go. I say don't talk too much more. I can't. I'm not going with you. So you can see Doug down there going down. He just made an important point that we probably won't get to later in the video so we're going to make it now. So you can see him throwing the rope down below him. It's important that you don't let like the coiled loose rope get above you because it might get stuck and then you're in a pickle because you have to ascend the rope which may be super difficult in some situations to fix that cluster up above you so keep pitching it down below you as you get tangles in the rope. Okay so I'm going to show you an extended rappel to where you have not usually a line scale here but a sling and the ATC is now kind of like way above you but that allows you to put your autoblock prusik or climb heist below your rappel device and I'm going to pretend to know why that's important right after I'm done asking Bobby why do we want it below? You know that's an excellent question. That's the way I was taught to do it. So it must be right. It must be right. I've always clipped it to my leg loop which seemed a little sketchy for a non-double back leg loop but hey. Okay so this is working so far and we're going to find out how much force I'm getting which I assume is going to be the 0.71 peak force I got on the last one. So I think this is super awkward. I've never done an extended rappel before. This is not to trap you guys into just putting hundreds of comments on this video for the algorithm. This is literally me going this feels awkward. The desk has got a giant aluminum square between me and my rappel device. Peak force and let's get started. I'm not going to tell you to smash that like button because that's annoying when you're watching YouTube videos. 0.69. All right this feels weird. Wow since I don't need my hands I'll film myself. Can we rappel like third class next time not just fourth class? Oh god wow 0.88. This is not comfortable. Here's my problem. I have to lift the rope up to get it through the device right and so I can only slide this thing down a couple inches so I'm only able to lift the rope up a couple inches. It looks like I'm jerking myself off down here. I assure you I'm not enjoying it that much. 0.93 kilonewtons. Interesting. I just got down and as the last person it is now time to pull these ropes. There is a knot joining them at the top so you can only pull it one way. So uh pop quiz which rope are we supposed to pull? I forgot. Yours? You know? I think it's this one. I didn't look. Is that a guess? Yeah that's a guess. Yeah it is. That's an important thing to remember because you might pull on the other side really hard and potentially jam it into the rappel rings depending on how they're set up. So we are going to untie all our other knots. It's usually one of those things that I say out loud when I'm leaving a rap station that's like pull a purple. Yep. We're going to um thread it. Thread it through gated hooks. Wow. Wow. All right. Nice hooks. Those musty be strong. Those must must be strong. Don't laugh. It encourages me. Ryan um I just don't know if they're strong yet because we still haven't tested them. Yeah because we're too busy dicking around making rappel videos. Yeah you know I thought a rappel video was gonna be boring but this is actually pretty good. I am surprised how long not only this video is but how long it's taking us to do the easiest rappels I've ever done. Did we all confirm that there was no knot in there? Did we have like a group meeting about that? Like who's gonna free solo this 5.5 to get up there if there's a problem? Please don't. Um is there a knot up there? There's no knot. Okay we're good. Can I keep pulling? Yes. Okay yes. Okay so notice how coordinated we are here. Bobby is pulling the rope and I'm feeding it through the musties down as we go so that one half of our rope is already going to be on the ground. It better be before the other half comes down. This is how we get efficient in rappelling because we like to rap slowly and we like to talk about stuff so. Efficient? Is that using two ropes for a 30 meter rappel? 35 meters. Oh we're stepping the game up. It's always the last five meters that gets you Nuh-uh it's the sudden stop. Yeah it's not the fall it's the stop. Um totally true. Yeah the falling is actually a lot of people do that for sport. So if we look up at our our flat overhand here it's rolling nicely it's not getting caught on stuff. Yeah. It's really the big advantage of that knot. Yeah. Names aside. So we've tested the American death triangle and found out it was anticlimactic and just a shitty anchor. It's coming at us on slow motion. Open wide. Our hero. Four. Four people at one effing rappel station. Oh man. People wonder when you might factor two. When you have four people at a belay station and you can't all stand before your anchor. I could melt this video seven more minutes to get us to the ground or we could just do this. Magically we're down here. You like that teleportation? I'm gonna try this Australian thing now to get me down the remaining part of this second class hike. I would have to go really slow to make this desirable. This is awful. No I'm not gonna Australian rappel. Please be safe when you're rappelling. Understand your rappel device. That's what this is when you're rappelling with it. It's a belay device if you're belaying with it. And don't get your knot stuck. Don't rappel off the end of your ropes. Keep your ropes with you so you're not pulling things onto you or losing them off to the side. And think through your system and make sure that your thing is working before unclipping your personal anchor. And always be clipped in. I'm not making fun of you Doug. And double check each other. And watch our next video. Go smash the like button. No point to the camera and say smash the like button. Smash the like button. Okay see I'm a YouTube not a newbie. Smash the like button. That was gold. All right cheers. Thanks for hanging out with us today Doug. Yeah now we're gonna multi-pitch climb. I love hanging out with you guys. You're smart and funny. Well we fooled him. All right so we're gonna multi-pitch climb now and make that another episode. So Bobby what should people do to see that video? Subscribe. Did I get it right? You got it right. And what button should they push? I forget the name of that button again. Tell me. The like button.