Pros and Cons of gear slings

Another con: it has been known to kill people. A couple years back a young woman was leading, fell and somehow a piece of gear on the sling caught, and she was hung. I believe it took rescuers to remove her body from the wall.

C Blank wrote: lol I love how all the comment along these lines. Most of the dudes up in Shasta area of NorCal that I've met and put up most of the FA there (30+ years of climbing) rock the slings. Actually most of the older school guys I've met rock the sling.

yeah and they are probably still using hexes and shoes that are 15 years old... doesn't mean it makes any sense. All those old guys are also probably climbing 5.6 so its not like it matters anyway on that stuff.

Harness racking works for sport climbs and many types of short trad routes. It is preferable for overhanging routes where the sling hangs way behind the climber (although the backward-hanging sling is easily corrected by clipping it to a harness loop), but on the other hand is terrible for any kind of crack climbing requiring the body or some part of it to be in the crack. Harness racking also impedes hip scums in corners, and even if the scum works, it can be very hard to get at gear that is pinned against a wall.

If you are carrying a large free-climbing rack, say a full set of nuts and trinkets and doubles in cams, I find it too hard to get at everything when it is on the harness, the load-in-the pants feeling is unpleasant, and large cams hanging low from harness loops can tangle in pants cuffs when performing high-steps, and loosening the harness for clothing changes produces a major struggle to hold up all the weight.

At belay changeovers when leads are swapped, it is a wash if the leader has placed most of the gear. If the leader hasn't placed a lot of gear, then handing over a properly racked sling saves quite a bit time compared to handing over all the racked pieces one at a time, and makes it less likely that gear will be dropped. (Of course, there is the potential to drop an entire gear sling, but almost all climbers are careful enough not to let that happen.) Moreover, if the party is going for speed and is racking each cam on a dedicated biner, then gear can be accumulated on slings, passed to the leader, and used as-is without any re-racking (or only re-racking some of the nuts) for several pitches at a time before order has to be imposed.

At belay changeovers for block leading, the second should be cleaning onto a sling which is passed to the leader, regardless of the racking method the leader is using.

Although rather unpopular, I find the looped gear slings to be an excellent compromise. They keep large racks organized, and the gear doesn't fly around to your back and hang out of reach on overhangs. The leader can spin the sling around to the front or around to the back and the gear stays there. I leave the frontmost loop empty and use it for desperate situations when you need to re-rack a wrong-sized piece, as well as an easily accessible location for pre-selected pieces for hard placements. With such slings, I put the quickdraws on my harness (along with personal gear) and carry some long slings over the opposite shoulder.

It should be clear that there is no right way and, on short climbs without wide cracks or scumming corners, very little real to prefer one method over the other. As the climbs get longer and include a wider variety of features, racking on a sling seems to have an increasing number of advantages.

Racking nuts on a sling often allows you to test and place nuts without having to remove the entire biner of nuts from your sling. IMO, very convenient and less apt to accidentally drop nuts.

jeffblankman wrote:Racking nuts on a sling often allows you to test and place nuts without having to remove the entire biner of nuts from your sling. IMO, very convenient and less apt to accidentally drop nuts.

Also very dangerous.

20 kN wrote: To have to take every single piece off your harness and hand it to your partner at every belay is rather annoying, and sooner or later you are going to drop a piece in the changeover, I guarantee it.

Never have dropped a piece this way, in 10 years of trad climbing.

Agreed, it is very dangerious. And a very bad habit.

10 years of trad and never dropped a piece of gear? Really?

I use both a sling and a harness. Serious climbs get a sling. Less serious climbs I don't care one way or the other. But "never" dropped a piece of gear? I haven't dropped many but I have dropped enough to notice.

Down side to climbing on a rack? If you do drop the rack you are generally screwed. When I do climb with a rack we exchange pieces one at a time (as with a harness) or the entire sling which ever is faster and more secure. Never...never.. more than one piece at a time in any serious setting. But that means there are TWO slings and each will still have at least part of the rack on still on both gear slings.

On hard trad lines and in the alpine if you have judged it right you'll run out of gear at the end of the leads so it can be faster to just swap the gear slings over. But as I said, drop it and you are screwed.

jeffblankman wrote:Racking nuts on a sling often allows you to test and place nuts without having to remove the entire biner of nuts from your sling. IMO, very convenient and less apt to accidentally drop nuts.

Yeah, that's really dumb. If dropping shit is such a concern for you, you really should focus on not dropping things, rather than inventing new techniques that bring a very rare occurence (hanging by gear sling) into the realm of bruised pride in terms of likely fall outcome.

Plus, your "clever" solution means that you'll be hard-pressed to get a good placement unless your body stays close to the wall anyway *and* the placement just happens to be at chest height *and* the placement is simple enough that you don't have to flip the nut over to place it.

I don't usually play the "you must be this rad to enter" card (because I'm not typically that rad) but seriously, spend some time actually leading routes before you start talking about the pros and cons of a certain racking method. There's no way you'd still espouse this idea of yours if you'd placed more than one nut on lead in your life.

If dropping gear really needed to be addressed so directly, you'd be better served with a single-strand accessory cord "leash" connecting that racking crab to your harness, and even is a terrible idea.
/still in the gear sling camp

rgold wrote:Harness racking works for sport climbs and many types of short trad routes. It is preferable for overhanging routes where the sling hangs way behind the climber (although the backward-hanging sling is easily corrected by clipping it to a harness loop), but on the other hand is terrible for any kind of crack climbing requiring the body or some part of it to be in the crack. Harness racking also impedes hip scums in corners, and even if the scum works, it can be very hard to get at gear that is pinned against a wall.

Just goes to show - to each his own. I am a crack climber and I rack on my harness for everything. I climb Alpine with a 70M rope... and I use it. A "short pitch" is anything less than 150'.

It's mostly a matter of preference. There. I said it.

I really like using a sling (really 1" runner) when I'm doing easy stuff with only a little bit of gear. I use a CAMP Alp 95 thong, er, harness, and it's gear-loop free. The gear stays on the sling and can go in or out of the pack with the rope, while the harness stays on and is light enough to never get in the way, even when running or skiing.

If I have more than a set of nuts, a couple screws, and a few slings - I want a real harness and usually leave the sling behind.

Jon Moen wrote: Never have dropped a piece this way, in 10 years of trad climbing.

Well many, many people have, and I am sure harness racking has been a big contributing factor in many cases. Think about it, if you have to hand over ten pieces of gear each pitch on a ten pitch route, that's 100 pieces you have to hand over for the whole climb. If it was on a rack, you would only have ten pieces of "gear" to handover. So in my example, a climber may have a 10x higher chance of dropping something if he used his harness to rack gear on versus a sling.

20 kN wrote: So in my example, a climber may have a 10x higher chance of dropping something if he used his harness to rack gear on versus a sling.

That reminds me of the time an entire sling worth of gear went flying past me on Moonlight Buttress. They guys wanted to jumar our ropes for the next 5 pitches... "We really don't want to retreat at this point."
"That's cool, I understand - Willie and I weren't psyched about hauling our bag the rest of the way up."
And a deal was struck - We took time to take extra lines up and fix them, they hauled for us.
Point being - you can still drop stuff. If I was in the mode of picking a side and then making whatever arguments I could come up with to support it I'd say that with a sling you drop THE WHOLE rack.
I've dropped gear once in 25+ years, BTW, so it actually does not figure into my equation at all.

buy a Misty Caddy and be done with this topic. 6 gear loops. plenty of room for a ton of shit.

I alwas use a gear sling for trad routes (except for at the creek). It is easier to stay organized, to whip the gear around to grab with left or right hand, to dangle below for the ow sections. Plus I don't like a lot of weight on my harness. Very uncomfortable.

gear on harness. draws on sling.

I'm with the Colonel! All this other talk is blah blah blah.

Kilroywashere! wrote:buy a Misty Caddy and be done with this topic. 6 gear loops. plenty of room for a ton of shit.

+1

I routinely rack a double set of cams and nuts, tricams, free 'biners, trad draws, anchor gear, and personal gear on my MM Caddy with no trouble. I have also never dropped a piece of gear while changing over or placing. It sounds like some people need some soap for their butter fingers~

Unless I am using a light rack, I go ahead and use my big wall chest harness for racking. I like the way I can have it sorted and not all clumped tightly together, it keeps the gear up away from my knees and it is a lot more comfortable. Shoulder slings make me feel like I am going to strangle myself and either hang in front of you on low angles, getting in the way, or the gear is out of sight and reach on steep stuff