How NOT to Big Wall 2.0 - Better climbing beta when climbing El Capitan in Yosemite

Would you like to know how to big wall? We're going to go over anchor management and setups on this tree here in Yosemite on this episode of How Not to Highline. Big wall. Highline. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and this is I'm Christian Black and we're going to show you how to big wall. I made a video a few weeks ago that went just down the list of everything I knew about big walling before my friends went and we filmed it and made an episode about it. And some people left, some people really appreciated it and other people had comments and better ways of doing things, including him, because he's done seven big walls and has a really good system. He currently works for Yosar. This is not a Yosar video, but he definitely gets some experience doing that. So I was self-taught. Some things are probably not fully accurate, but I know logistics on how to survive on a wall. I've probably spent about 60 days or nights on a wall and so I feel really comfortable up there. He does walls in a day too often to really get that ledge thing dialed, but he has a great anchor system and that's what we're going to focus on today in this video. I have been, I did 11 years of big walling. I've successfully topped out 17 times, but like I said, I was self-taught. He's done the nose in a day a few times and what else? Lurking Fear, Freerider, Leaning Tower in a day, Prowl, a variety of things here in the valley. So it's pretty hot outside and we're at the Rostrum doing highlining because this is a highline channel and we wanted to make a video since we're together and we're going to do it on this tree because there's really no anchors around here. So let's start with the haul bag and his setup. I'm going to show you guys first how I like to set up my harness for wall climbing. It's pretty straightforward, but some little things can make it easier or more difficult for you. So first we'll go over the daisies and the ladders because that's pretty standard wall equipment. There's a couple different ways you can set it up. The way that I tend to use is just one non-locking carabiner, a solid gate with the narrowest nose profile you can find. So these Petzl Straygate Spirits are pretty good. I think Camp has a new carabiner called a Dyon that might be smaller than this. I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems like it might be good. And that's just girth hitched through my hard points and I have it. You'll notice here on the end that it's girth hitched to the end of this carabiner and that's because if I get to the anchor and I want to shorten myself up I can clip it like this and still be safe because if these bar tacks rip it's still connected to the end of the daisy. And then also I like to keep the daisy on the spine side so that when you're climbing it can slide up like this if you need to. And the grab loop on the side facing you. So this is the system I typically use. The cons to it is that if you want to take your ladders off it's a little more difficult because you don't have a dedicated beaner to them. And then so another system that's pretty common, which I have on the other side, is with separate beaners for your ladders and your daisies. Now this is an adjustable daisy. I've used these before and I do like them. I don't own a pair, but I've tried them out and they're quite good. You can just yard yourself in or pull this up to extend yourself out. In this system, you know, you're going to want a locker if you like having a locker for clipping yourself into the belay to make it a little more secure, that's fine. And then you would just clip your ladder on a non-locker to that. And then when you're actually aiding, ideally you want to clip the carabiner that holds your ladder so that way you get the extra height. Because if you clip this carabiner then you lose this carabiner's worth of length every step. And that kind of adds up over the course of a wall. So that's how I like to have that set up. Lastly here on the front of the harness, the Fifi hook. I found that the best length is just gear fixing it through the belay loop rather than the hard points. Sometimes it can be a little hard to like Fifi in. But another tip on that is it's always going to be faster if you just try not to Fifi as much as you can. It takes up a lot of time when you weight every piece. So if you aid climb like you're free climbing where, you know, you put in a piece of gear and you climb to the top of the ladder, try using face holds and climbing up as high as you can and like stemming out your feet. Pretend like you're free climbing just with a little bit of aid help and you'll end up going a lot faster. So anytime you can really not weight the piece that much or have to Fifi into it, you're going to save a lot of time. And that's what makes big walls more fun, honestly. It's going a little faster and not having to carry as much stuff because hauling is the worst part. And we'll get to that next. Now we're going to talk about how I set up my haul bag and also my hauling kit. So I really like these Metolius bags. They're a little burlier than the black diamond ones. And they also have these offset haul straps, which are awesome because what they're for is so that you can clip another carabiner here that's about one carabiner length shorter. I usually do a wire gate non-locker and then you can open it up while it's hanging at the belay to get stuff inside if you need it. It's a little hard. Some people have systems where you can like yard it open or close like a little pulley thing. This tends to work. It takes a little bit of muscle, but it works fine. And then I have my red carabiner here. This is one that stays locked the whole time. It's the main beaner that my bag hangs on. Then I have my swivel attached to that. And then I have a locking carabiner with the knot that goes to the haul rope. And I would have a knot protector here normally. This little eight mil cord is my docking cord, which I'll show you how to do that once we get into the anchor setup. And then this is my backup sling. And then one point about this knot right here. A knot that I really like to use, especially on older ropes, if it's like this rope has been up maybe four or five walls now, it's starting to get a little worn. They tend, the knots tend to bite down and get pretty tight. So if you just do a normal figure eight, it can be really hard to untie by the end of your wall, and especially if you need to untie that knot for anything else. So the knot that I really like doing is called an unfinished eight. So you do like a figure eight like normal, and then you just thread a bite through. And then you have this bite hanging out and you capture the other strand. And that's what you clip to that. So you can haul on this all day. And then if you need to take it out, you can just pull that bite through and it comes undone pretty quickly. So that's kind of a nice little trick I figured out just on one of my most recent walls that I like a lot. And then next we'll go over how I have my haul kit set up. So this would be exactly what I'm tagging up as I have it shown here. Looks kind of like a cluster, but we'll kind of break it down. So this is a Petzl protraction. You can also haul on a microtraction. If you're, you know, if you're doing anything more than like 150 pounds in your bag, protraction is noticeably easier to haul on. The thing about these is you have to clip this beaner through the bottom to lock it, but you can open the gate of it and leave it on the beaner, which is nice. And this is just the other end of my haul line. I just have it clipped to this beaner. And then this is the backup sling. This is super important. So whenever you're, whenever you're actually hauling, this backup sling needs to be clipped through either of these ropes. And that's so that if the protraction or the microtraction fails, there's something between you and the haul bag. So the whole way of the haul bag doesn't fall down the line onto whatever you're hauling it up with. Pretty important piece. And you can just integrate it straight into the same beaner setup. Yeah. And then I just have the end of the line here. So that's usually what I'll tag up or what I'll have up behind me. If you're, if you're trying to free climb on a wall, all this stuff can be quite heavy. So the best system for that is just using a six mil tag line and carrying only what you need to free climb with, and then tag up the anchor kit, the haul kit, and anything else you need just to save weight there makes it quite a bit easier. So yeah, that's kind of haul setup. On most climbs, at least a lot of the walls on El Cap and stuff and other walls here in Yosemite, there's going to be a nice little ledge, unless you're doing some like gnarly aid route. So if you get up there and there's a nice ledge, you don't have to put in your daisies right off the way. You can just throw in your anchor kit. And that's what I like to do. So I'll show you my anchor kit. This is the basis of it. And the key here is giant locking carabiners. I always want the giant locking carabiners. So a lot of times on walls, you'll have three bolts or two. So I'll just show you with the two, which is what I like to do. So I like these petzl carabiners a lot. They're really big. And I have it set up just like this as like the basis for my anchor kit. And the reason for this is you clip these to the bolts, and then you clip nothing else through the bolts, which is nice, because it's really hard to clip multiple carabiners through these and everything can just be clipped straight to these carabiners, which is awesome. So you put the anchor kit on. And then the first thing you would do is you would fix your partner so they can start jugging. So you'll pull up some rope, and you need to make sure you give yourself enough to haul with. So I usually pull up maybe like 10, 12 feet, 15 feet, depending on if I'm space hauling or not. And I like to do an alpine butterfly right there. So that's my partner is fixed. And then on this bottom one, which can also stay locked, I just don't leave much slack. And then I clove in. So this is my main attachment point. And now I have plenty of room to haul off of. My partner is fixed and they're backed up. So now I can yell down, you're fixed. And they know that they're safe to start jugging up. If they don't need to release the bags yet. And you should always fix before you start hauling and stuff. That way, if there's any communication error, just like Ryan mentioned in his video, if you start hauling, then they should be able to assume that they're fixed. So always fix before hauling. Another point that Ryan mentioned in his last video is take, for instance, on the first half of the nose, where it's turning up and right. I want to fix my partner on this side and I want to dock the bag on the side that the route traverses to that way the bag can lower out pretty cleanly and not have to touch all this anchor stuff because it can be kind of messy sometimes. So now I'll set up the haul system, which is pretty easy because I like to carry it pre-rigged just like this. So we went over this earlier. I just clip this straight to this high point and then I'll take an alpine draw and I'll stack the rope into it. This is pretty similar to Ryan's idea of the rope bags. I just don't like carrying bags because I like to try to free climb as much as I can. And free climbing with grocery bags is probably annoying. So I'll just set the sling up like this and then I'll start pulling rope through and I can pull up the haul line and stack it as I go, all in one like this. We've reached our haul bag. Look, I'm a haul bag. And we're ready to start hauling and so here's a little bit of haul technique that's nice. It's like hard to pull now. I'm ready to start hauling and my partner would, at this point, lower out the bag if they needed to and undo the docking which I'll show you in a little bit. Hauling might sound simple in theory. You just weight the rope a bunch until the bag gets up there but there is some technique to it. So what I like to do is put a ladder on either side of the anchor and these are to grab onto or for my feet to be in. Notice how, you know, now we have a spare thing here. You could put another locker up here to put for other stuff if you needed to. Then I'm going to take an ascender which you should have on your harness if you're leading because, or you can tag it up if you're free climbing, and you clip it straight to the rope here. And then the last thing that I like to do, and this is the key, is take another sling and you girth hitch it through this top hole here and then put it in your mouth. When you're hauling, all you should be doing is sitting down holding these and then and then when you stand up it pulls the sender back up with your mouth. And then pretty simple. One hand is just going down just to grab the rope as you pull it up. Okay and so the other method you can do is if your bags are really heavy and you're still trying to one-to-one haul, which I recommend if you can one-to-one it's always going to be faster than doing the two-to-one haul, is one person at the top of the belay or who's like closer to the is doing that method and the person below them has a microtraction and an ascender. And they're going to be hanging further below the anchor and they're going to be on the haul line and they're basically going to take that person's body weight off of the total weight of the haul bag so it's easier to haul. So the person down low is going to have this microtraction on their belay loop and one ascender up here and if you can imagine they're like 10 or 15 feet below the anchor they're just going to lean down and they're going to go like this. And this is pretty easy to do like while your feet are just out on the wall and you're just like pushed out and like fully weighting the rope. And you can actually time this pretty well with the person at the top doing the mouth and the sling method and get a really good rhythm going and get your bags up pretty fast which is kind of nice. That's basically my two favorite haul techniques. Our bag is near the anchor and now we're gonna dock the bag. So this is where this docking sling comes in nice. A lot of people say they like to dock their bags high. In my opinion it doesn't really matter. It's nice to dock them high if you're gonna stay there for the night but when it's low sometimes you can actually like sit on the bag or stand on it it's kind of nice. So I usually just get mine and dock them low and they're out of the way. So the bag's up here. I'm gonna put another locker right here on my quad and then I'm going to tie this off with kind of like a variation of a munter mule overhand. So clip it through and then I wrap this around and I tie the munter. And the reason I like tying the munter this way is because it's always if you if you tie it by passing it through the gate of the carabiner it's always loaded in the position where it's ready to lower out so the munter doesn't have to flip. And then with these tails you just macrame them around a few times and then you tie it off with just a simple square knot. So now the dog is backed or the bag is docked excuse me and then you just take your backup sling and you just clip it to the anchor. And so now all the weight of your haul bag is is still on here right now so what you'll need to do is you're going to do one last mini haul where you put your center through and you haul up just until you can get the teeth of the cam off of the haul line and then you like lower it back down and then you take that off. Now your bag's weight should fully be resting on this docking cord and it's backed up and you're good to go. And then once that happens your partner should be at the belay by now and so one thing they can start doing is they can take the rest of the lead line and from their tie-in point coil it up and stack it on a sling and just put on this side of the anchor. So we'll do that real quick and maybe fast forward and we'll show you what the whole finished anchor setup looks like. Okay so my partner has got to the belay they were jugging up and one of the first things they should be doing is they should coil their rope starting from their tie-in so that my end is on the top of the stack and ready to go. Because you're climbing. Because I'm climbing which brings me to another small point which is block leading in my opinion is way way faster on walls than swinging leads because you don't have to try to remember all the certain things you need like the haul kit you can just stay in a good groove of just like leading and hauling and leading and hauling in like blocks of like four hours tends to be good that way it evens out the workload even if you're with a slower climber you're doing the same amount of work so like we'll lead in like blocks four hours then just switch which is kind of nice. So he's stacked the rope and we just put it in another sling right here. In the past I've had I've had this sling this alpine draw be integrated into the locking carabiner here but I found that I like it better as just an alpine draw because that way you can just take the whole stack off and unfaff it around if ropes are mixed up and then clip it back which is which is kind of nice in my opinion and so this is kind of what your whole anchor setup will look like when you're ready to go. So notice how this haul line is all stacked and it's on one side of the anchor and the route's traversing to the right and it's docked here into the middle and then the lead line is on the left and it's just really simple it's really easy to tell what's going on and you only needed two bolts and we only needed two bolts you can there's ways you can do this with three but this seems to work really well for me and then it's like you always have an extra bolt if there's something else you need to deal with you know or if you have a third and yeah it's just kind of nice and that is what will save you the most time while climbing is just efficient belay management you can waste a lot of time faffing all this up. The more complicated it is the more messy it could get and the more messy the harder it is to even stay safe by knowing that you're clipped in as simple as safe yeah and so now while he was stacking the rope I would be grabbing gear off of him and for the gear that I needed I knew or I knew I needed for the next pitch and then I can be getting this all ready to go again so I'm going to reset this thing what's that this goes on agree agree uh yep yep it's a great way to do it and then as soon as you're ready you would just do your yeah now one more small thing about stacking the haul rope like this is if you're on a climb that that's pretty steep and you you don't really need a knot protector one thing you could do is switch ends of the haul rope every time because this end is on top so you would just clip it here and then you take this end and clip it to the haul bag a knot protector is pretty important we were doing a rope swing here at rostrum yesterday and we were pulling up our test bag and it's only maybe 100 pounds just chewed my knot up and it was only rubbing on the edge for uh just for a minute um just use a what do you use a water bottle yeah she's a top water well just like you do and you thread the rope through it and then tie your bite and then yeah so um it's really important to protect the knot so it is but only like leaning tower to me is yeah leaning tower maybe zodiac but even leaning tower has two ledges where the bolts are back in the ledge so you end up having to go over a lip so and a solution to that would could just be having a knot protector installed on both ends and then you can switch ends as many times as you want which is quite nice so i'll show you the switching ends method because it works pretty well so the the haul bag is already docked and backed up so i can just unclip it from the rope here so now i'll just take this end that was on the haul bag which is now at the top of my stack and i'll install it through here because i like to i like to climb with this pre-installed so now this is ready to go again and he just clips it there and now i can start climbing that is this feeds out super nice that's pretty nice yeah 32 pitches on the nose me flaking a bag yeah it's just back into another bag it's nice because you don't have to restock this again you know you i've tried rolling it before the the coils don't always work yeah so if you can uh i think a knot protector on each end and switching ends of the haul line every time is awesome uh saves a lot of time you're on belay buddy cool yeah and then i'm on belay i'm ready to go all i do is take in my clove hitch he's got me on a gregory there you know maybe if this third bolt's here i'll clip that as like a jesus piece and just be on my way yeah i actually fell at the los aerospire direct past my anchor and if we didn't clip a quick draw to that i would have just pulled on him really hard um either way it sucked for me but like it uh it's pretty important to clip something cool yeah all right you're on belay all right climbing uh don't climb big walls on uh trees try to stick with uh the big granite walls we have here in yosemite but if you have any tips or tricks that you want us to include in maybe the next video let us know um if you have questions about things we discussed we can dive in deeper and stuff and make sure you see my other video that i did i dive in real deep on logistics of how i pack a bag and i'm more of like more than just this stuff it's kind of more comprehensive so uh check that out and all this is quite a bit of work therefore you shouldn't highlight shouldn't big wall or big wall fine hey thanks for watching but don't be an idiot and go try big walling for your first time after watching some two dudes on a tree on youtube that you don't know show you how to do it yeah like and uh on my end you know i i'm don't claim to be an expert on this ryan's actually done more walls than me but this is not an expert this is a system that a good friend of mine showed me and that works well for me um neither ryan nor i have any climbing certifications we're not guides this is just to give you some ideas of how to manage your anchor and some ideas for how to be more efficient big wall climbing so uh thanks for watching yeah we just want you to remember how youtube works people with cameras can put anything they want on there and uh we think this is a good idea we use it but uh be safe out there okay if you're interested in highlighting we have about 100 videos on it on this channel because that's what how not to highline is about so you can check out our rigging our break tests and all the stuff that we've got going on in our other videos so make sure you like follow and subscribe so you don't miss any of them cheers