Our Rope Management At Belays top tip shares a simple and effective alternative to stacking ropes over your anchor rope. We hope you find it useful.
Good Rope Management
Good rope management at multi-pitch belays will avoid many problems. At the very least you’ll stop tangles and knots developing. At worst you’ll stop a rope section getting lost to a rope eating crack.
Sometimes you will have enough rope on a belay stance to flake the rope at your feet. At other times you need a different strategy. A popular method is to flake loops of rope over the rope running between the climber and the anchor. This works really well provided care is taken to stack the rope in loops that get progressively smaller.
The Problem
Sometimes, however, you are on a stance where this method won’t work so well. Maybe you are constricted on a small stance. Perhaps you have tied in to the anchors on a short tie in. This might make it impossible to stack one rope across the other. Perhaps you are climbing in a three and your ledge partner can help stack the rope while you belay. Whatever the reason, our rope management at belays top tip offers an alternative.
The Solution
All you need to do is use a 120cm sling and connect one end to an in-reach protection piece on your belay. Next, attach the other end of the sling to something like your rucksack shoulder strap or your bandolier. Infact, anything secure that sits at about chest level will work.
Now, as your partner climbs, stack the climbing rope in coils across the sling. As with any similar method, you need to make sure the coils decrease in size to ensure they won’t become tangled when you feed them out again later. Once your partner has been belayed up to you, you can take the sling karabiner and clip it back to the anchor. Your rope will stay neatly stored out of the way until you or your partner need to begin feeding it out for the next pitch.
We hope you have found this top tip useful. We have several others on our website including one about Cleaning Ropes here and one about shortening equalised anchor slings here.