Poison oak on a rope

I got to the top of a mulitpitch the other day. My elation of being finished with the climb was cut short, when I noticed my partner sitting in a bush of poison oak, with my rope neatly coiled right on top of the bush. Since then, I've reason to believe that there is poison oak residue on my rope.

Has anyone had this problem, has anyone found a solution? Tecnu is the soap to go for with poison oak oils I know, anyone tried to clean a rope with this?

Nothing worse than getting poison oak without even touching it yourself. It looks like tecnu has some stronger solvents in it that you might not want on your rope, but in principle any soap should take the oils off your rope.

my rope once ended in a pile of poison ivy, and i just used liquid dish soap, and alot of it. it was fine. Good Luck

Dawn dish soap is very good at getting rid of oil or grease. I have no idea what it might do to a rope though - but I doubt it would hurt a rope much ???

Go read the essential oils and rope thread.
Any pH neutral or nearly neutral (6-8) liquid detergent should be safe for the rope.
Basically, any modern name brand liquid laundry detergent.
Run it on a cycle cold or warm (wouldn't do hot). Spin and hang to dry.

I soaked my fixed lines in diluted simple green in hot water in a five gallon bucket for about 15 minutes. Rinsed it in hot water for about 15 minutes. Then washed it in a pillow case with some light detergent with hot water. This is the treatment I do for everything that I get in contact with poison oak, minus the rinse.

My one caveat being that this is only a rope that I use for jugging. I was not worried about using hot water or using simple green because all of the evidence I could find indicates that neither of these things will harm nylon with this level of exposure.

To reassure myself I cut a yard off of the end of the rope, which is 6 years old, heavily used, and has been hanging on a cliff the last 5 months. I pulled out a single strand of the core, there were 10 total. I bounced on it about 7 times before it broke at the knot.

I weigh about 170 lbs, there are 10 strands, there is also the sheath. I have another rope that has a lot of poison oak on it and this is how I will clean it as well.

simple green is basic, which isn't as bad as acids but I don't think that nylon likes bases either.
If its a 10 stand rope then I'd expect a single strand to have a breaking strength of 500-800lbs.

This last weekend a few of us got out on some remote climbs. P.O. All the way up the trail and all over the belay pads. We were stepping all over it, rope was in it too. There were P.O. Plants growing out of the cracks on the route as well. Rope was in that and my buddy was gardening and ripping it out as he climbed.
None of us got it! I don't know how but my guess is that the plants aren't pumping out the oils at this time. You may be perfectly fine.

JoeGaribay wrote:This last weekend a few of us got out on some remote climbs. P.O. All the way up the trail and all over the belay pads. We were stepping all over it, rope was in it too. There were P.O. Plants growing out of the cracks on the route as well. Rope was in that and my buddy was gardening and ripping it out as he climbed. None of us got it! I don't know how but my guess is that the plants aren't pumping out the oils at this time. You may be perfectly fine.

Doesnt sound like it was poison oak...

Just curious where you got the 500-800 lb number from. I was curious about how strong it should be on its own, but I couldn't find any information about it online.

I would guess that the strand would have broken at greater than 400#'s if I had a proper test rig, given that I bounced on it several times and it broke at the knot.

I was mostly just curious about taking apart the rope and seeing what was inside it and much more concerned about it's age and time outside than about washing it.

I was also curious about pH's. PMI Rope Soap has a pH of 8.5, Simple green is 8.5-9.5 and Dawn dish soap is 7.4.

Morgan Patterson wrote: Doesnt sound like it was poison oak...

I understand your thought completely. Though we've all been around it since we were young and it was without a doubt poison oak. There's a chance that the mugwort did its job. We all lathered up on the stuff before we hiked out. I haven't used my rope since but I will be thinking about it next time.

Jayson Nissen wrote:Just curious where you got the 500-800 lb number from. I was curious about how strong it should be on its own, but I couldn't find any information about it online. I would guess that the strand would have broken at greater than 400#'s if I had a proper test rig, given that I bounced on it several times and it broke at the knot.

Well, shock load is different from a standing load. Repeated shock loads with the rope in the same configuration and knots will cause it to fail at a lower strength than a single slow pull will.
I wish that they would publish the max breaking load specs for more ropes. I've seen 28-34kn. So if its 30kn one tenth is 3kn or about 600lbs.

TecNu was designed for radioactive fallout, and was also found to be good for poison ivy. Save it for A-Day.

Use the ropes wash made by Sterling.

Joe definitely wash your rope or lather up after each use. The oils from the poison ivy don't go away. I read of a guy who wasn' allergic, he even ate the stuff to prove it. He was handling a 300 year old basket woven from ivy and got a sever reaction.

Buy a new rope. I had that happen once, and despite cleaning the rope, I had poison ivy rashes on my arms and the back of my neck for months (where the rope touched me while I was coiling it). It was terrible.

I once had a rope saturated in poison ivy oils, and received severe rashes from it because I didn't apply tecnu until it was too late. As far as cleaning that rope, I cleaned it much like I clean any rope, soaking in warm water in my bath tub with a few onces of hand/dish soap, except for this rope I added a bit of tecnu to help remove the poison ivy oils. I've used the rope quite a bit since with no apparent rashes, so it appears to have worked well.