Big wall Knots Big Wall Bible Big Wall Knots The lightest but most useful thing you can take up a big wall is knowledge. Welcome to a resource that will help you be successful in getting up big rocks. Big walling is a big topic so we broke it into bite-size "pitches" with a video to START each one. The aim is to have lots of videos, photos, and written content in each section, not just of our stuff but your stuff as well. See HowNOT2 contribute your beta below. Our courses are A-Z content in blog format, glued together with an overarching blog we call a textbook. A blog format is easy to read, easy to update, and easy to translate. Be sure to begin at the TEXTBOOK and at the end of each episode we'll point you to the next. It's "knot" that hard to learn how to twist your rope in all the ways you need to go up a wall. This ties together a foundation for the next chapters so we can just show you what to do without getting stuck on knot basics. Knots are actually quite easy though. There are about 5 families of knots you will use and honestly only 3 would get you by. Hitches are nothing unless you have something in them and there are only 3 of those you need to know. Friction hitches let you bite a rope with a smaller rope and they are a handy and lightweight tool to have. Learn all 5 of those but you'll probably only use 1 or 2. We also cover anchor concepts so you know what to aim for when building anchors. Knotology - bights, follow-throughs & bends So many fancy words but it's so easy. Bight is when you pinch a rope into a loop, then tie your knot, you will need a carabiner to clip it. Follow-through is when you tie half the knot, put the tail of the rope through what you want to attach and then re-trace or finish the 2nd half of the knot. Just like tying a rope to your harness, you tie half a figure 8, put it through the two hard points of your harness and then trace it. BEND is just joining two ends of a rope to make a loop or connect different ropes together. The working end is the end of the rope or the side you are tying the knot with and the standing end is the rest of the rope. KNOTS Overhands Simplest of all knots. Overhands on a bight are not that secure so unless you are just tying a quick knot to clip some gear to it and have your partner pull it up, this isn't really used. Same idea with a follow-through, but if you tie the 2nd half like a mirror you get a butterfly, but that is for later. Flat webbing does best with an overhand so if you are making a sling, you join two ends (a bend) by using an overhand and then tracing it with the other end and this is called a water knot. Pre-tie an overhand, then stuff the ends of tubular webbing inside of itself, then shuffle the knot where the "splice" is and you have a BEER KNOT, which is a water knot without tails. An overhand bend in ropes is bomber and is one of the best knots to prevent getting stuck in cracks if joining two ropes for rappeling. It's called the EDK or European death knot because if you don't have a long enough tail, it collapses as it gets pulled tight and the tails can slip through. Just remember 18 inches of tail if you bail. Double Overhands One extra wrap with an overhand gives you more options. Wrap the tail twice around a bight or after doing a follow-through and bam, you have barrel knot, which is the closest knot you can get to an object as it tightens around it. Just remember this is also the hardest to untie. Use it as a bend and you get a double fishermans, also one of the most difficult knots to untie. A stopper knot is when you just put it all by its lonely self at the end of the rope so you don't rappel off the end of it. You still want a hand width of tail on these knots but these suck the tails into the knot less than any other knot regardless of how hard you pull. Figure 8s Here is the most common knot in climbing. Tie it with a bight and clip it to the anchor and the rope is fixed and ready to ascend. Do a follow-through to tie the rope to your harness. You can join two ends together in a bend, called a flemish, but it's rarely done in big walling because EDK or fisherman's knot is used. If you double up the strands as you tie it, you can get bunny ears or the super 8, building redundancy into the knot. The figure 8 can be difficult to untie if you keep taking whippers on it, but just hauling or ascending usually doesn't require a hammer and your teeth to undo it. Bowline This is the easiest to untie but also the easiest to slip. These shouldn't be used without doing something with the tail that helps lock it solid like a smith lock or Yosemite finish. You also can't ring load it, pulling on the loop itself, or it comes undone. You do not join two ropes this way. This can be such a great tool in your toolbox but if you don't learn it really well, you can 100% get up walls just using Figure of 8s instead of these. Butterfly This is a great midline knot. It's also easy to untie and therefore unties itself easy enough that you don't want it right on the end of a rope. But if you plan on tying something in the middle of a rope, whether a bag or a person, this is bomber and it doesn't deform regardless of which direction you pull it. This is most commonly found to isolate a core shot, or damaged section, of rope, like on a fixed line that you have to rappel or ascend. In theory, you could use it as a bend and join two ropes but it isn't super secure requiring long tails and has no advantage over the EDK. HITCHES These literally don't exist without something in them. Easy to do and (mostly) easy to undo but they aren't knots as you can't tie them and set them down, as they would just fall apart. Clove Hitches Opposing twists in the rope can secure it pretty good. You can secure yourself with it because the ends of the rope are so far away they can't slip through but don't get carried away and attach everything with this in every spot on the rope. It in theory can slip because it's not a knot and if you respect that it's a quick and dirty way to attach the rope to things. Girth Hitches If the twists are the same you get a girth hitch which is fine if you attach a sling around something that doesn't open but it's not great with rope so don't attach yourself with it. The rope doesn't like to sit well and it's trying to do a spready the whole time. There are some anchors that incorporate it but we'll cover when it's ok and not ok to do that in the anchor section. Munter Hitches This is where pear-shaped or HMS carabiners shine. You need the space for this awesome hitch for adding friction but you have to hang on to the tail. You could rappel with this or belay someone with this but in big walling, it is most useful to attach the haul bag leash with a munter because you can take that tail and tie it off securely in a way that can be released when it's under load. You can't untie other knots while force is being applied to them but with the munter, you can! When you have a haul bag(S) so heavy you can't lift them, it's nice to be able to keep them secure, and when the leader is ready to haul, release them without lifting anything. Before locking the munter off, make sure it is in the direction of pull the load will be taking it, otherwise, it wants to rotate the knot and can suck in the mule overhand or barber pole into the HMS carabiner. SINGLE STRAND ⮕ MMO or Munter Mule Overhand is a half twist slip knot with an overhand to finish it. All these twists can be undone while under load. DOUBLE STRAND ⮕ Barber Pole is like a VT prusik or a Beal Escaper in that you can just weave the two working ends around the two standing ends. Weave it about 5x then terminate it with a square knot (two opposing overhands). ANCHOR CONCEPTS Building anchors is building a temporary bomber pit stop on the way to the top. If you fall, and every piece blows, you will always have the anchor. You need to fix the rope so your partner can ascend and you need to haul the bag and you can't afford to have the anchor come out since everyone and everything is attached to that and only that. You need it strong and redundant, ideally equalized between the gear and not to take forever to set up. There is no perfect anchor but you are trying to achieve a balance between all these important concepts in the acronym SERENA. Strong - Bolts are strong, well-placed cams and nuts can be strong. Two bolts or 3-5 cams can collectively be 40kN strong which is 20x stronger than you need to jug and haul on or 5x stronger than the worse force you'll ever get on it. Equalized - Ideally, you want each piece to be sharing the load. If you are using good bolts, in big walling this is less of an issue if you haul off one bolt or hang a portaledge off one bolt IF everything is interconnected and redundant. This does matter if you are building an anchor out of cams and nuts. Redundant - This is the number one goal in a big wall anchor. Can one point fail and you still be connected solidly? If you have a 10:1 safety ratio, stop worrying about how to make it stronger but see if you can get another SEPARATE 10:1 safety ratio built into the system. Efficient - I was climbing a 5.5 and once had a partner take an hour to build an anchor on a tree. He was trying to equalize multiple branches instead of just girth hitching two slings around the base of the tree in 30 seconds. If you don't understand these concepts holistically and hyper-focus on the wrong ones, it can too long to build anchor and have something that sucks at the end. Hint: trees are stronger at the base. You have a ticking clock when you are on a rock, don't run it out building an anchor. A bolted station shouldn't take more than 60 seconds to build an anchor. No Extension - If one part of your anchor breaks, will your anchor extend? If it does, in theory, could shock load your system putting a lot of force on the other pieces. If you have a rope in the system, that will absorb most of that problem. Tying a knot at the master point isolates the legs and prevents this but it isn't always that important on a big wall. Angles - Wide angles increase the force on each piece. If you keep the angle small between pieces, they can actually share the load. Bolted anchors on big walls are normally placed about 12" apart so you don't have to think much about this, but if you are using a crack 3 feet off to the side to supplement those bolts, you might want to put the gear pretty high up to keep that angle small. At 120 degrees, each piece is seeing 100% of the load instead of sharing it evenly. This isn't the end of the world if you are on a good bolts and only ascending or hauling, but just understand this concept when you come to an anchor piece you are not confident in. Sliding X This "X" is ironically a V shape between 2 or 3 pieces. If you have multiple pieces, it's best to make a sliding X with two and another sliding X with the other two and equalize those two sliding Xs with a sliding X. This is called cascading Xs. It's absolutely critical to put a twist in one of the strands before clipping or you are half as safe because if one piece blows then it will slide off the end and you die. This type of anchor is great for equalization but not good at "No Extension" because your anchor will drop a foot if one piece blows shock loading the other pieces. Not a huge concern with two good bolts on a big wall anchor, but it's not redundant because if it gets cut by a rock, your anchor is fully broken. To solve the redundancy problem, you can take two or even three shoulder length 60cm slings and make a sliding X and that is bomber. BFK - Big Fat Knot You can isolate all the legs of your anchor by tying an overhand or figure 8 knot. One entire leg can get cut and you are still in the game. One bolt or cam can blow and you would barely notice since it won't extend. You have to tie it in the direction it will be used or it won't be equalized since it can't self adjust beyond the knot getting tighter. It's efficient enough if you have the material to work with because it does take more material to tie a fat knot than just a sliding X. Trying to do this with a should length sling might make your angle too big and be awkward to tie. If you clove or girth hitch the bottom of the V around the carabiner then it takes up less material and still isolates some risk. However, if that webbing locked around the carabiner rubs the rock enough and breaks, then you are at risk of it all coming apart. Quad Anchor This is the solution between a sliding X and a BFK. An overhand halfway down each leg isolates the strands from the risk of "too much shock load" but still allows it to adjust and perfectly equalize within a range. This requires a much longer double-double length 240cm sling. A 240cm Dyneema sling is bomber and not bulky. A 6mm accessory cord is also bomber and more abrasion resistant in exchange for more bulk. Rope vs Webbing Sliding X vs BFK is mostly sewn-sling-centric but you can grab about 8-12 meters of a 6mm or 7mm accessory cord and now you have the flexibility to create any type of anchor. Clove hitch the crap out of it and super 8 the masterpoints for an all points, inter connected, super equalized enough, strong and fast anchor. The only downside is this is a more bulky option. FRICTION HITCHES Wrap a smaller rope around a bigger rope just right and it will grab like an ascender. The general rule is you want the smaller rope at least 2mm smaller. Some grab only in one direction, some are a PITA to undo if a lot of force was put on it and some can be undone if it's currently loaded. These slide up or down a rope so the rope itself is fine because it's always touching a new spot but the loop you make your hitch out of can get hot, so the kind you can buy a HOLLOW BLOCK made with non-melting sheath called Technora, but you can get away with just using 6mm accessory cord and tying it in a loop with a double fisherman. See our video about it by clicking the thumbnail. Prusik Wrap the loop inside itself 3 times so the loop you clip is in the middle. This can be pulled in both directions but is difficult to release after a full load has been put on it. Klemheist Wrap the loop several times around and put the bottom loop inside the top loop and pull down. This is good in one direction and bites super good enough. Auto Block Wrap the loop around your rope 3x or 4x and clip both loops. This doesn't hold as well as the others but if you just need a little friction below a belay device, then this could work for you. VT Prusik This is NOT made with a loop but an eye to eye sling that gets wrapped 3 times and then braided until you can't braid it anymore. You can get a sewn VT PRUSIK made of Technora from Blue Water. This can be released while fully weighting it and slides up easily. This only bites the rope in one direction. See our VT video by clicking the thumbnail for it. KNOT Challenge Test yourself!!! Try tying all these knots in one breath! Don't pass out and get hurt for gawd's sake, but see if you can knock this list out sitting there holding your breath. You're going to be tired, bonking, have low sugar, and stressed on a wall and need to tie these so your life can depend on them so it's good to practice this while stressed. You will need access to both ends of a climbing rope for the knots, 2 meters of webbing, a Hollow Block, VT Prusik for the friction hitches. Ideally have a carabiner hanging about chest level for the hitches and then the friction hitches with all your supplies on a table right next to you. Tie them all before holding your breath and when you can get it all under 90 seconds then go for it. 21 KNOTS ☑Overhand bight ☑Water knot (in webbing) ☑EDK overhand bend ☑8 on bight ☑8 follow through ☑8 bend (flemish) ☑Super 8 ☑Barrel Knot ☑Stopper Knot ☑Double Fisherman ☑Bowline with a backup knot ☑Bowline on a bight ☑Alpine Butterfly ☑Alpine Butterfly follow through ☑Clove hitch ☑Girth hitch ☑MMO ☑Prusik ☑Kleimheist ☑Auto Block ☑VT Prusik 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get 90% of your big walling gear here. This leads you to a detailed buying guide. HowNOT2 Contribute Please send video, image, or words, that are respectful to other viewpoints and helpful to Big Wall education. Please be kind by delivering something ready to add and tell us where you think it best fits. We'd also like to link to anything you found helpful online. Maintaining the quality of this resource is important so please submit something worthy of 100,000 people seeing it. We reserve the right to not post what you send us. ryan@slackline.com What's Next? Episode 8 will be live 10/26/2022. Patrons have early access BigWalls.com leads to our textbook and was donated by John Middendorf who runs BigWalls.net. This course is free but not free to make. If it really helped you, please consider SUPPORTING US.

Placing Gear Big Wall Bible Placing Gear The lightest but most useful thing you can take up a big wall is knowledge. Welcome to a resource that will help you be successful in getting up big rocks. Big walling is a big topic so we broke it into bite-size "pitches" with a video to START each one. The aim is to have lots of videos, photos, and written content in each section, not just of our stuff but your stuff as well. See HowNOT2 contribute your beta below. Our courses are A-Z content in blog format, glued together with an overarching blog we call a textbook. A blog format is easy to read, easy to update, and easy to translate. Be sure to begin at the TEXTBOOK and at the end of each episode we'll point you to the next. How do you place all that gear you are carrying? Do you need to have a trad climbing background where you already know how to place cams and nuts? It helps, but isn't that necessary since you rarely fall on the gear and therefore don't actually know if what you placed was good or not. Climbers also don't free climb placing the tiniest micro nut, two lobes of a totem, hooks or knife blades, so it's essential we start "from the ground up" on how to place gear. STEEP LEARNING CURVE Have your friend put you on belay and jump on lead for the first time doing an A4 right off the deck to see if you can figure it out. JUST KIDDING. You can ease into placing gear by doing C1s slow AF and then work your way up to an occasional hook OR you can top rope a hard aid pitch and really practice using the thin stuff or hooks. Try super sketchy stuff if you are on top rope to see what holds and what doesn't. Once you understand the mechanics of the rack you are climbing with, do a pitch or a few on lead before heading to your first wall. If you are always grabbing gear 3x before you get the right piece, it could take you way too long to climb a wall. So like every part of big walling... PRACTICE. Pro Tip: DON'T practice on the ground! You will land on the ground if it comes out and bust an ankle. You don't get cool kuddo points for your injury if you were just being dumb. Top rope or just rope up and lead something instead. Don't Pound Your Pecker Into Just Any Crack Clean climbing is placing gear without a hammer. If the route can be done clean, leave the hammer at home. The rock is already scarred from just 50 years of pitons being hammered into them, and then being knocked up and down to remove them. Think 200 or even 500 years from now and consider the impact of our collective actions. With better gear today, we can do a lot without a hammer. However, there are still plenty of routes that do require smashing something in and that's ok, just be mindful when and when you can't do it and don't be to eager to pound your pecker in just because it fits. Gear UP A double set of totems (exclude orange), aliens, offset aliens and C4s #0.75 to #3 will give you about 4 options for every placement. 2 sets of offset micro nuts, 1 set of offset normal nuts, 2 cam hooks, 1 grappel, 1 talon and a handful of rivet hangers is the special sauce to the hard spots. This is an amazing base rack that is surprisingly light for having about 60+ pieces of gear. All this can be purchased from Extreme Gear and is in our The Dream Big Wall Buying Guide. Then depending on the route you plan on doing, just add more of something or bring more specialized gear. Big Cams Something you'd whip on These are the easiest to place but there are things to know. Don't cross the tips of the lobes or it is over-cammed. That doesn't make them less reliable, but you have to squeeze it more in order to get them to come out. If the cam doesn't sit well, try flipping it over. Set them in the direction they will be when you weight them or fall on them. Don't just stick them perpendicular to the wall or it will shift so much it may not longer be a good piece. "Walking" is when the cam wiggles back and forth as you move your rope up your climb. Flexible stems like Aliens really help prevent this but so do extending your clip in point with slings. Cams slip more often than break in our tests so if a crack constricts at all, it can be amazing to place it like a nut, but this can make "walking" even worse if you're not mindful. Offset cams is where two of the 4 lobes are smaller than the other two. Piton scars are rounded out and so the back of the hole is smaller than the front. Always place an offset with the small lobes in first. Double axles give you a lot more range. Black Diamond Camalot C4s are the best cams for everything from small hands and up. Below the green #0.75, aliens and totems way out perform them. Single axle cams like Metolius or Trango is sub par and a waste of your money. Totems get away with single axles because their lobes are shaped uniquely. Alien offsets have a soft metal to bite the rock better, a better shape of a lobe, and a more flexible stem which is essential to not lever the cam out of a pod. Metolius offset cams are cheaper but they sucked so badly I gave mine away to someone who didn't know better. We don't even sell them on ExtremeGear on purpose. Buying gear that doesn't work, means you have to buy it again later which costs more money in the long term. Take fewer better cams if you are strapped for cash. Totems can be placed in a sketchier placements because only two lobes have to hold to clip to and get to your next placement. That might not hold a fall with just two lobes, but it's fine for an aid placement. The blue and black alien have a cult around them, but the biggest one (orange) isn't really any better than a #1/#2 Black Diamond C4. Small Cams Wow, it's holdin.... ahhhhh Really small cams have a really small range. Black Aliens, Black Totems or #0 BD Z4 cams take the challenge out of thin cracks but there is no wiggle room. Put the cam against the rock and if it doesn't go it before squeezing it, that means it might be the right size. If you have to squeeze hard, your cam is too big. As comforting as a cam may feel, a cam hook might serve you better in a thin crack. Micro Nuts Only offsets should exist DMM brassies are made of soft brass so they bite the rock well and the non parallel sides, or "offset" shape, make them fit at the base of piton scars where it is smaller in the back of the crack/hole than the front. The tiniest one might make you pucker a little but the biggest one is something you could whip on. Nuts Bring 2 blue nuts with every rack Slot these in constrictions and you have a bomber placement. Cracks are rarely super parallel so offset nuts are awesome. Turn them sideways and you can get them to fit a larger crack. You can get a lot of bang for your buck having 10 pieces of gear on 1 carabiner and only costing about $150. Honestly, with cams being so awesome today, you only need 1 or 2 sets and you can skip the biggest ones. Don't bother with normal nuts that are the same sizes as the DMM brassy offsets. I carry 3x of the smallest BD offset #7 and 2x of #8 and 1 of #9 and that's it. Hexes Don't waste your time, money or weight - Don't big wall with these. Cliff Hanger & Grapple Hooks Crimpers without tendons Don't climb 5.13s? No problem, this hook can crimp that for you! You might be shocked how solid a hook placement can be and how much you can shift around and it doesn't pop off. Other times, you might not understand how it is staying on that round crystal you set it on. Most of the time, if a hook move is required, there is a place for that hook. You can file down the edges so its a bit more narrow allowing it to fit in more places. It's the base of the hook that gives it stability. If you are only going to carry 1 or 2, carry the medium or bigger one as they also can do smaller spots; but smaller hooks can't do bigger hook placements. Talons have 3 hooks sizes and offers a solid base, however it can't get over a "jug" like a bigger hook can. A single 5.6 jug on an ocean of 5.14 granite is often times just hooked so read the topo to see what you might need. Always carry at least 1 medium one and 1 talon. Instead of drilling bolts, sometimes the first ascentionist just drilled a shallow angled hole for a small hook like the talon to fit in. It's pretty damn bomber for what it is but keep your eye out for what looks like a wood pecker hole if you don't see anything obvious. Cam Hooks Sideways hooks Instead of placing "tiny" gear, you can go a lot faster if you just throw one of these in and a stand up. The camming leverage this creates on the sides of the crack makes it pretty difficult to just fall out. Inverted cam hooking is when you place them in cracks in a roof. If you take your pressure off these for even a second, they fall out. Practice placing these on top rope and while weighting them, try to push away from the rock to see if and when they come out. Knowing the limits of these will give you a lot more confidence when you use them in real life. Peckers Smash them, passively place them, or just make jokes about them You can hook a thin crack that bottoms out or gets very narrow very quickly. If it is a place many peckers have been before, you can just place yours in there without pounding it. These can be passively placed and therefore considered clean but if you are on hard routes, you hammer them in and you can tell if they sit well or never got secure and you can't smash them anymore. You would just try the next size up then. There are left and right angled peckers in case the crack is in a corner and the swaged cable would get pinched if you were to use a straight pecker. it can help to pre-install webbing in the eye at the back of the pecker head so you can clip a funkness device to it to remove it later. Angled Pitons Metal tacos or big wall forks. Mostly only useful for a heavy big wall fork. Cams replace the need for these but piton scars were formed by the exact same piton being used for decades, you could just cut one in half with an angle grinder called sawed offs and passively set them in there and can be super bomber enough. Lost Arrows Expensive Metal Wedges Place these half way in, smash them almost to the eye. The pinging noise should get higher pitched as you go. Knife Blades Sheet metal with eyelets Same idea as a lost arrow, but thinner. RURPs Metal postage stamps. If you can't use peckers because the crack is too shallow, you might have to use these Heads Nuts you smash Even if you never place one, you are likely to clip a head if you climb long enough. These get placed in pockets that can't take any other gear and if there is no constriction, just the friction of the metal to the rock is all that is holding you. If it doesn't have a cable anymore, as those can wear out first, place a pecker on top of the dead head to still use it. The circle shaped heads are for horizontal cracks. Copper heads are a harder metal and therefore better for smaller cracks and aluminum heads are softer. #2s and #3s are the most commonly used sizes. Place the cable side of the head deeper inside the crack to avoid hitting the cable with the hammer. Smashing this on the rock with a chisel is called pasting because you hope it sticks! It might help to carry different size chisels and be sure to have them all tethered. Practice, but do it on a shit boulder in the middle of no where and funk out what you put in. Don't smash these in on rocks people climb unless it's on an aid route that calls for it. 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get 90% of your big walling gear here. This leads you to a detailed buying guide. HowNOT2 Contribute Please send video, image, or words, that are respectful to other viewpoints and helpful to Big Wall education. Please be kind by delivering something ready to add and tell us where you think it best fits. We'd also like to link to anything you found helpful online. Maintaining the quality of this resource is important so please submit something worthy of 100,000 people seeing it. We reserve the right to not post what you send us. ryan@slackline.com What's Next? Episode 7 will be live 10/19/2022. Patrons have early access BigWalls.com leads to our textbook and was donated by John Middendorf who runs BigWalls.net. This course is free but not free to make. If it really helped you, please consider SUPPORTING US.

Big Wall Rack Big Wall Bible Big Wall Rack The lightest but most useful thing you can take up a big wall is knowledge. Welcome to a resource that will help you be successful in getting up big rocks. Big walling is a big topic so we broke it into bite-size "pitches" with a video to START each one. The aim is to have lots of videos, photos, and written content in each section, not just of our stuff but your stuff as well. See HowNOT2 contribute your beta below. Our courses are A-Z content in blog format, glued together with an overarching blog we call a textbook. A blog format is easy to read, easy to update, and easy to translate. Be sure to begin at the TEXTBOOK and at the end of each episode we'll point you to the next. What gear do you need to lead while aid climbing? A whole lot! We'll show you our racks if you show us yours. WHAT do we carry and WHY and HOW. RACKOLOGY Pick your poison. You have to carry 30+ lbs of gear and have two ropes attached to you (lead line and haul line). Do you want some of the weight on your shoulders but covering access to your harness, or do you want all of that cluster on your hips? Then you need to decide if you want the most used gear up front and center, or the gear you will need when you are most desperate. Regardless of how you skin this cat, do it the same every time so you can be blind at night or low on sugar and still grab what you want on your first try. Stay organized! If you go with someone who likes a chest harness and you don't, see if you can find a middle ground where you can both rack the same, OR you can lead in blocks so you only have to switch everything over 1x per day. Learn each other's systems because when you are following and cleaning a pitch and your partner is leading the next pitch, deliver the gear to them in an order they like. To mirror or not to mirror. It can be nice to have a blue totem on each side of your harness. You never know which hand is going to be most free as you are smashed into a flaring chimney where the only usable crack is way in the back of it. Putting your 2nd cams on opposite sides, or mirroring, gives you options but it can also be hard to keep track of how many you have left or even stay organized. Sometimes it's nice to just clip them all next to each other if you have lots of gear loops or one on the other, pulling the bottom one off first. Ryan's Rack Big picture: chest harnesses cover your waist harness gear making accessing the gear a PITA. Gear on it also can hook to waist harness and prevent you from standing up at the most in-opportune time. EVERYTHING is on my waist harness. Personal gear goes on back loop. Gear is racked in groups by brand with the smallest towards the front. I'll carry a triple rack and even quadruple blue/black totems, but they are only taking one spot on my harness as they are clipped to each other with their own biner. I do not mirror anything. I can keep track of how many I have left easily this way. All cams have the same color biner associated with them except my offset aliens so I can tell them apart from the normal aliens by just looking down really quick. The Real Beta I spent DAYS putting together The Dream Big Wall Buying Guide at Extreme Gear. It is detailed on why I like certain gear and what purpose it has. They sell 90% of the gear you need on a wall plus 10% of what you buy there supports this project which gets us 100% stoked. If you are buying gear at retail prices, please buy it here and we can keep growing this resource. Personal Gear Always pants, never shorts. Long sleeve lightweight shirt with hoodie to keep sun off my neck Low ankle approach shoes NO knee pads Grivel's 3 finger gloves - these protect the pinky unlike other fingerless gloves Hard shell helmet (not styrofoam kind) with headlamp In my pocket - topo, snack, spare batteries and 2 Zip lock bags if I haven't shit that day yet. Alfifi by Skot Richards Yates adjustable daisies 2 Yates ladders independently in their own carabiner Both ascenders when I'm following, 1 ascender when I'm leading Grigri & Atc Lead Rack - links to each item are in the Buying Guide 2 Sets of micro nut off sets - no normal micro nuts. Each set has it's own biner 1 Set of normal size off set nuts. All these are on one biner Every cam below has its own Camp Dyon or Photon Double rack of totems, 4x of blue and 4x of black, I don't take the largest yellow size Double set of Aliens Double set of Offset aliens Triple Rack of #0.75-#3 C4s no need to overlap my totems with smaller sizes when I have so many aliens Only a #4, #5 or #6 C4 if required 4 quick draws, 6 double lengths (120cm slings) 6 Free biners with rivet hangers dangling on some of them 4 spare lockers 1 grapple and 1 talon and 1 cam hook regardless of grade Quad anchor with 4 HMS lockers attached to it ready for the anchor on the back gear loop If I have a hammer (rare), its hanging on the sling below my feet, not on my harness Water bottle half full on the back loop VT prusik and knife are my entire emergency kit and are on the back loop Protraxion on the book loop Haul line attached to 2mm string tied to my rear full strength loop. If the haul bags fall for whatever reason, it breaks the string, not my back On my shoulders: 15x 10mm dyneema 60cm length slings with one carabiner per sling NO JOKE. Take a Rocky Talkie. It's worth its 199grams in gold if anything out of the ordinary happens. It really sucks to depend on your partner doing the right things in the right order if you can't talk to them and only have rope tugs to communicate. Take it fully charged and you won't even need spare batteries. You get 10% off with this LINK. Jeremiah's Rack Big picture: personal gear goes on waist harness and chest harness gets all the lead rack. He splits evenly the gear between both sides. Nothing is stacked on anything else. Cams are placed in order of size not grouped by brands. Personal Gear GTX shoes to protect ankles, TC Pros Climbing Shoes if free climbing Knee pads All FiFi Petzl Evolve Adjustable Personal Anchors Grigri Nut Tool Atc At least 5 Lockers Ascenders - even on lead Nalgene Gloves Tibloc, nano trax, knife Chalk bag Sunglasses sometimes Rocky Talkie Helmet with headlamp Hammer in a hammer holder Funkness device 12-18 draws Anchor Coordallette Leading Gear on Chest Harness 2 Yates Ladders Micro Off Set Nuts Mixed nuts including offsets Micro Cams including blue and black aliens, BD Z4s, Metolius X4s 2 set of totems up to Red 2 sets of BD C4s Inside the chest harness pouch: Mechanical advantage setup Just the Tips Vertical Clipping Warning: If you clip a cam to its sister cam's carabiner, you must remove the lowest cam first. If you don't you will drop the lowest piece of gear as you rotate the higher carabiner. Practice at home dropping gear if you pull it off wrong so you understand how it can happen and prevent doing it up high. Hammer Hack: If you are doing a clean route, you can bring a small hammer like THIS with a hole drilled in the wood handle to put some paracord on it so you can hammer out your nuts and clean your gear. You don't need a big ass hammer for basic tasks like that. String Theory: Put a 2mm string on your haul loop. Clip the haul line to your rear in a way it can break the string before your back if for some really horrible reason the haul bag disconnects from the anchor. 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get 90% of your big walling gear here. This leads you to a detailed buying guide. HowNOT2 Contribute Please send video, image, or words, that are respectful to other viewpoints and helpful to Big Wall education. Please be kind by delivering something ready to add and tell us where you think it best fits. We'd also like to link to anything you found helpful online. Maintaining the quality of this resource is important so please submit something worthy of 100,000 people seeing it. We reserve the right to not post what you send us. ryan@slackline.com What's Next? Episode 6 will be live 10/12/2022. Patrons have early access BigWalls.com leads to our textbook and was donated by John Middendorf who runs BigWalls.net. This course is free but not free to make. If it really helped you, please consider SUPPORTING US.

Living On The Wall Big Wall Bible Living On The Wall The lightest but most useful thing you can take up a big wall is knowledge. Welcome to a resource that will help you be successful in getting up big rocks. Big walling is a big topic so we broke it into bite-size "pitches" with a video to START each one. The aim is to have lots of videos, photos and written content in each section, not just of our stuff but your stuff as well. See HowNOT2 contribute your beta below. Our courses are A-Z content in blog format, glued together with an overarching blog we call a textbook. A blog format is easy to read, easy to update, and easy to translate. Be sure to begin at the TEXTBOOK and at the end of each episode we'll point you to the next. Existing in a vertical world is an art and honestly one of the coolest forms of camping. But you don't know what you don't know if you haven't done it, so hopefully, this will tell you what you don't know. The idea is to practice everything at home near the ground so it's smooth as butter (or those shits after those freeze-dried dinners) when you are super tired after climbing all day. Don't Fall Out Of Bed Rock ledge or portaledge, don't fall out of bed. At least be tied in if you do. You can be tied in with a personal anchor as long as it is bomber (Metolius easy daisies are not "rated") AND it is connected to something bomber. The straps of a portaledge are not! The most flexible and bomber connection you can have is a grigri on the end of your haul or lead line. Of course, make sure you have a knot in the end and that the rope lets you get as far down or out as you'll need to be. If you only sleep on your sides and back, this can be fine, but it's a big chunk of metal right at your groin. The alternative is to just clip a personal anchor at an extended bomber attachment point like that same rope with a figure 8 on a bight or a sling. Keep good rope management as you weave in and out of a portaledge or be mindful of the rope if walking around on a ledge so you don't knock stuff off or trip. PRO TIP: If you are on a narrow ledge that is great to sleep on but very narrow, hang your haul bag to lean against that edge about at your chest/stomach area so you have a point of reference of where the edge is as you sleep. You still cuddle the wall but you can always touch the bag as a false sense of security so you don't feel like you will fall out of bed. Overly Attached Everything you have needs to be attached to something in the vertical world. Pre-clipping everything you can with a carabiner before putting it in the haul bag makes this way easier than hunting for free carabiners. Since you only have one bottle out at a time, you don't need a carabiner on every water jug since they stay in the bag all the time. You can girth hitch the gear sling inside the haul bag with a loop style daisy and clip everything to that in the order you want it. If you want the flexibility to remove that daisy if you are so fortunate to get to a horizontal anchor, just clip it to the gear loop with a small locker and then you can spread it out and yard sale in under a minute. It's ideal that everything is sealed up, but this method really requires it so nothing gets dumped out. Be sure to have no loose items in the haul bag so you don't drop things when you pull out another item. Bags in bags in bags in bags is the trick, and every bag has a clip in point and most have a dedicated carabiner. Pre-set up your sleeping bag, pillow, and air mattress to have a clip in point. This is what your spare carabiner stash is for but they are awkward and not naturally have good spots to clip things to. WARNING: If you attach things to your ladders in a vertical set up like in this episode, the stuff will get tossed around quite a bit if you try climbing those ladders. Try to keep those clear and only for going up and down. Setting Up & Tearing Down Open stuff up one at a time, keep it clipped in. To put it all back, reverse the order. You have to set up a portaledge before pulling out the sleeping bags, and you have to put all that stuff back in the bag before tearing down the portaledge. PRACTICE at home or on a crag living off a 2 bolt anchor, or even a tree, and live on the wall for 1 night at least before going up a wall in real life. Work out the kinks when you don't have a quota of pitches to meet the next day. PRO TIP: "Is that rain I feel?" It's 3am, you were too lazy to attach the fly that you hiked and hauled but now you feel rain droplets on your face. Think about the cluster it would take to get both of you off your ledge to unclip it, attach your fly, and clip the portaledge to the bottom of that. You might as well just get up and start climbing! PRE-ATTACH the fly cover for your portalege if you brought it! Shitty Mornings It's way more convenient to shit in the morning when you have a ledge and all your stuff is out.
You need to know if you have the magic skills of picking one function at a time, if you can't hold the pee when you poo, you can't squat on a portaledge like the ground because you are just trying to bag the poo. Ideally you just squat though. Good news! Your butt hole isn't behind your knees so just drop your pants enough to get to the hole which means you may not need to take off the harness legs. Roll gallon zip lock bags over 3x for a firm rim which keeps the game fun and clean. Bag it in a bag and put your WET WIPES in there when you are done. TP is of the devil when you don't get a shower for a week. You don't need those wag bags that are so big you can literally stand in them. The plastic bulk makes storing it a PITA. As much fun as it is naming poop tubes El Crapitan and Poopinator, just cut open bottles 75% that you already have and duct tape them closed after you stuff your double bagged treasure. Pre-wrap duct tape above where you plan on cutting so it's completely hassle free. Make sure your bottle is bomber and you can hang it 30 feet below you with a lot 7mm accessory cord. At the top, put that bottle in your tripled up grocery bags now that you are pretty much out of food and you will have a lot of plastic between you and your turdlettes. Pee bottles are highly recommended on popular routes or just so you don't have to get out of a portaledge in the middle of the night to pee, only to find out it's shorter than you think and you just pissed all over the ledge where you have to lay your head back down. Think Up and Down Think up and down, not side to side. You lived your entire life in a horizontal plane but now you are in a vertical plane. Don't put your haul bag next to your portaledge if you don't have the horizontal space to do so. You don't want the bag below the ledge or you can't access it. So create an easy way to go up and down your vertical house. If the ledge master point is at the same height as the bottom of the haul bag nothing conflicts for space. Have your ropes flaked tidy at the anchor with about 20-30 feet of each hanging out (not in a loop) for a bomber connection point whenever you need it. This would be the top of your rope so it's quick and easy in the morning for the leader to tie in and clip the haul line to them. If you are so lucky to have a 3rd or even a 4th bolt that lets you spread out, you can let your haul bag hang next to your portaledge, but if you step on the edge it will tip to the side. Clip a sling from the corner to a bolt/anchor point directly above it so it won't sink down if you do step there. PRO TIP: WRITE WITH A SHARPIE WHAT SIDE OF YOUR LEDGE GOES AGAINST THE WALL AND WHICH SIDE IS OUT TOWARDS THE VIEW. MAKE IT STUPID PROOF. Setting up portaledges coming soon! 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get 90% of your big walling gear here. This leads you to a detailed buying guide. HowNOT2 Contribute Please send video, image, or words, that are respectful to other viewpoints and helpful to Big Wall education. Please be kind by delivering something ready to add and tell us where you think it best fits. We'd also like to link to anything you found helpful online. Maintaining the quality of this resource is important so please submit something worthy of 100,000 people seeing it. We reserve the right to not post what you send us. ryan@slackline.com What's Next? Episode 5 will be live 10/5/2022. Patrons have early access BigWalls.com leads to our textbook and was donated by John Middendorf who runs BigWalls.net. This course is free but not free to make. If it really helped you, please consider SUPPORTING US.

Packing your Haul Bag Big Wall Bible Packing Your Haul Bag The lightest but most useful thing you can take up a big wall is knowledge. Welcome to a resource that will help you be successful in getting up big rocks. Big walling is a big topic so we broke it into bite-size "pitches" with a video to START each one. The aim is to have lots of videos, photos, and written content in each section, not just of our stuff but your stuff as well. See HowNOT2 contribute your beta below. Our courses are A-Z content in blog format, glued together with an overarching blog we call a textbook. A blog format is easy to read, easy to update, and easy to translate. Be sure to begin at the TEXTBOOK and at the end of each episode we'll point you to the next. You have 1 bag with 1 compartment, how are you going to pack it? We will cover several ways you can skin this cat, or fill this pig (haul bag nickname). Haul bags are not like other backpacks so it's worth spending a chapter showing you how to connect it, get into it, put the straps away, and put everything into it. This section covers everything at the bottom of a haul rope starting on the ground. Chapter 10 shows how to actually haul it all up, dock it and lower it off for its next scrape up. BACK Packing Packing for Hiking If you are going to hike the bag, put the heavy stuff on the bottom and the light stuff on top. It doesn't matter what order you need it in later. And keep in mind, even really light stuff that is piled on top of your bag makes it very awkward to hike since it gets so tall. It is highly recommended to put a liner in it. Some just use cardboard in a circle but a cheap foam mattress like THIS can be cut to 1 inside diameter of your bag and protect your content inside or your sharp content from poking a hole. It is the FIRST thing to go in the bag. The padding can help with hiking too, but even with that, if you have a heavy load, it can be nice to add a chunk of foam against your lower back before even putting it on. A trick to getting it on is to go down to the bag, don't bring the bag to you. Sit and put all the straps on until you are one with the pig, then roll up on your knees and then, staying balanced, stand up. If you need to take breaks, find a way to set it on a rock to get the weight off your back, don't take it off each time. Betcha can't guess what you should do... practice walking a mile at home with 80+ lbs in your bag before doing it your first time up a mountain. You might find pokey spots in your hips or back that you need to figure something out for, which is way way more convenient at home. Yes, you will look like a homeless person walking down the street, but a very motivated one at that! Stow Away Stow away your bag straps, not squirrels. No joke, someone got 2/3rds up Lurking Fear before a squirrel jumped out of their bag. Rumor has it that the squirrel is still falling to this day. BEFORE you put all your stuff back inside after getting to the base, tuck the straps in the pouch. Sometimes it's nice to take a gallon zip lock bag for the little loose pieces to put in the inside pouch of the haul bag. You don't want to lose those, it's not fun to carry your haul bag on your head because you can't use your straps because you lost the little pieces; just hypothetically speaking of course. Packing UP Packing for Hauling BEFORE packing, stuff your straps. Did we already cover that above? I bet you still forget! You have 1 compartment, put the stuff you need at the top. The flip side to that is to put things you don't need until that evening at the very bottom when you plan on yard selling or pulling all of it out. So, yes, your water goes at the bottom, and pack that bottom layer tight for a firm base. Just make sure you have enough water for just that day at the top too. Sleeping stuff generally goes on top of the water, and dinner/breakfast bags next. The top is just the food, water and jackets you might need in between pitches. One nifty trick is to girth hitch a loop style daisy to an inside gear loop and attach everything except for the water to it so you can just lift it out and it has everything on it. You can clip a biner to each item and keep everything free. OR you can clip everything to a daisy that you pull out with it all pre attached. Either way, don't keep loose items in there but keep everything in a stuff sack with a biner already attached to it. Multi-bag-plan: if you have more than 1 bag you can pack according to priority or pack by groups. If you don't need something until day 3 or 4, leave it in the bottom hanging bag and never touch it. If you plan on climbing an even more gear intense route, you can have a bag just for the rack the leader doesn't take. Leash Your Pigs Connection points for the bag Just clipping your bag to an anchor can make it very difficult to remove later when the next leader is hauling, whether that is lifting the super heavy bag(s) because the next pitch is way off to the side and not pulling it off the anchor straight up or the leader too enthusiastically started hauling and made it tight before you could unclip it. In that case, a Rocky Talkie (10% off clicking the link) is pretty damn nice to communicate the cluster. A releasable leash avoids most problems. Attach a 7mm cordelettes to the bag as a leash . You have a two options: 2 meters long which is just enough to tie a munter-mule-overhand, which is releasable under load, but doesn't give you any extra to work with to lower it, or a longer one. If you zig zag a lot, it can be nice to have a 20m long leash to lower your bag but then you have a 20m cluster to constantly manage. If you attach it to the master carabiner, make sure it's on the spine side and doesn't get pinched when transferring the weight. If you connect it to the lower handle, then you can get the haul bag as high as possible to the anchor, giving you easier access to the stuff inside. If you are going to use a backup sling, make sure that is also on the bag ready to go. Have an individual leash solution for every bag, even if you have multiple bags and plan on docking the entire chain of bags as a unit. If you spread out later at an anchor at each pitch, it's nice to have them independent. Bringing Closure To Your Baggage Closing the haul bag Black Diamond has a quick and easy a cinch cord to sphincter up the top but is less secure. Metolius has more manual fold over clip and double strap the top down which is pretty nice before sending your pig flying sideways because you didn't want to lower it out. Some bags have offset handles so the side without the straps is scraped up more, but if you put both handles in the same carabiner and it's heavy, you might not be getting it off later. Each handle gets its own carabiner and the shorter handles is the one that gets attached the haul point and the longer handle gets attached to the other handle's carabiner. This does put all the force on one strap, don't worry, it's still redundant and plenty strong enough. However, you can get your bag open without lifting anything. If you want your bag more level and both straps holding the load you can do what you can learn at VDIFF. Tie an overhand in the shorter strap making it ultra short, girth hitch a Yates Personal Anchor and clip that to the other carabiner. This way you can undo it anytime but it stays level. This requires more gear so pick your poison. Practice at home and not with an empty bag! See if everything fits and is something you can carry before you park your car to do you ANY wall. Every trip is different and every trip needs a pre-pack test done. Get all these details dialed before showing up. Hogtie the Pigs Connecting the bag to the rope You'd be shocked. how many ways you can connect your haul rope to whatever cluster you plan on pulling up. It's pretty standard to tie a knot and clip things to it (see how below) and therefore you need a bottle to protect your knot. It's just a water bottle with the bottom cut off but prepare the bottle BEFORE you get to the base. If you are in the swivel camp, a taller skinny bottle like smart water has covers everything. This bottle will slide up if there is slack in the rope and if you don't want a loose bottle moving around your rope, use a string to keep in in place. This is the only place a key chain carabiner can be justified on your system to keep this in place. To swivel or not to swivel. If the rope gets twists in it by the haul bag gets lowered on a low angle climb spinning the bag or from anything else, it can be pretty obnoxious to manage. Tying the rope directly to the swivel is the most direct method but if you plan on tying in short with a butterfly (to use the rest of the rope as a lower out) you'll need a carabiner anyways so you might as well put one on right away. Swivels are optional. To progress capture or "knot". You can put a micro traxion on your swivel or master carabiner and loosely clip the knot at the end of the haul line to the bag. This doesn't require a bottle because there is no tensioned knot to grind on the cliff and allows the follower to lift the bag(s) when pulling it out of a roof instead of trying to coordinate perfectly when follower pulls and the leader hauls. A poor man's rigging plate is an HMS (Pear-shaped) carabiner. If you place your docking tether on the bag's primary carabiner, or are trying to clip multiple bags to the haul rope, clip these items independently to an HMS carabiner on the end of the rope. You can clip up to two bags on on the same carabiner but iron out all this on the ground before you show up. Use a catch line, or a 2-3 meter long piece of spare rope, to extended down any third bag you have or sometimes its easier to create a haul train and have each bag hang below the other. Clipping one haul bag under another haul bag isn't ideal. If the top one isn't full enough it can get sausaged and deform by the lower bag pulling on it. If you haul two pigs, it can be nice to have the lower one just extended with a rope and not connected to the bottom of your other haul bag. Even if light, never unclip a haul bag that isn't tethered to something. This is a tip from Alpine Savvy's article on "Haul Bag Rigging 101" modified into a lighter version. The idea is to not have both bags smashed up against each other and you can extend the master carabiner or swivel with something, in this case, 2 lightweight 20cm dyneema slings. This photo is simplified and doesn't include any tethers. WARNING: The lower your bags are hanging at an anchor, the more of a PITA it is to get something out of them. A bottle + knot + swivel + carabiner + 20cm sling + straps = the bag is hanging at your feet if you hauled it all the way up to the teeth of your protraxion. Don't Grade Yourself "Lightly" Practice, Practice, Practice For the love of bacon, go throw a rope over a tree branch and fill your pigs with tons of anything heavy and do every variety of method we talk about here to see what you like the best for your speed, load, and preference. A Yates Adjustable Daisy would be nice on every bag, but if you have 3 that weight adds up. Play with different combinations of carabiners. If you don't use a micro-traxion, take your knot protecting bottle out for a spin. In the best case scenario, you'd go haul at a local crag in the worse case scenario possible - with the heaviest load up the low angle rock so you don't grade yourself "lightly". 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get 90% of your big walling gear here. This leads you to a detailed buying guide. HowNOT2 Contribute Please send video, image, or words, that are respectful to other viewpoints and helpful to Big Wall education. Please be kind by delivering something ready to add and tell us where you think it best fits. We'd also like to link to anything you found helpful online. Maintaining the quality of this resource is important so please submit something worthy of 100,000 people seeing it. We reserve the right to not post what you send us. ryan@slackline.com What's Next? Episode 4 will be live 9/28/2022. Patrons have early access BigWalls.com leads to our textbook and was donated by John Middendorf who runs BigWalls.net. This course is free but not free to make. If it really helped you, please consider SUPPORTING US.