catching falls with half ropes

As with all belay situations, there is an immense difference between "everyday" fall catches and "severe" fall catches.  Most falls on most modern climbs are short and have enough rope friction in the system so that there isn't going to be any problem catching the falls on a single half-rope strand (dia>8mm) with most belay devices.   There is the potential of being lulled into a false sense of security by catching a very large number of these  "common" falls and concluding that your belay setup is adequate when it really isn't up to the more rare severe circumstances that might arise, for example, when the leader falls past the belay on a multipitch climb (and of course falls near FF 1 on single pitch climbs that are not perfectly controlled will result in ground impacts).

As Jim and other European climbing groups have found, our ability to hold on to thinner ropes, especially a pair of ropes with only one under load, is notably less than what we can manage with a single larger rope.  This means, at the very least, that one ought to pay careful attention to the choice of belay device and the setup.  If you are going to use a plate style device, the ATC-XP is the probably the best.  I think the Metolius BRD device might have even higher braking power (I'm sure Jim will correct my about this if necessary), but its handling characteristics aren't good and this is a particular drawback with half ropes.  The DMM Bug used to be an option (not sure if Jim ever tested it) but is no longer in production as far as I know.  None of these choices allows for the contemporary addiction to guide belays.  If the ability to employ these (I think unpleasant) belays is a consideration, the DMM pivot may be the best combination of non-catastrophic lowering ability and braking power.   The ATC-XP seems to get its superior braking ability from the depth of the device body.  A little-known competitor that implements a similar depth design is the Climbing Technology Be Up, and it allows for guide belays and, they claim, remains functional for unloaded rope when the other rope is fully tensioned.  Jim hasn't tested this gadget so we don't know how it compares to the ATC-XP.

I think the suggestion of doubling up on the connection lockers for such devices is a good one, at the very least for multipitch routes with bigger severe fall potentials.  I recommend the following minimal test (whose results can be surprising even though the loads involved are nowhere near severe belay loads):  Do a single-strand free-hanging rappel with your device and see what level of control you have. (You might want to be belayed when you try this!)  If you need doubled carabiners to make the rappel manageable, then you most definitely need doubled carabiners for belaying.

As for gloves,  the climbing world is divided into people who have burned their hands belaying and those who haven't yet had that experience.  Most of those who haven't been burned haven't been presented with a severe enough fall (such falls are rare), but a few exceptional belayers might be so good at handling the belay that they truly can avoid burns even in severe cases.  If you are convinced you are one of those super belayers, go barehanded, but common sense suggests gloves, at least for multipitch situations with severe fall potential.  Even if gloves make it more likely that the rope might run a bit, I don't think the advantage of a better barehanded grip outweighs the potential for hand injury and possible loss of control if you turn out not to be a super belayer after all.  

Once you have gloves, you'll find they are nice for rappelling, and even allow you to do things like coil your ropes faster.  Moreover, specifically for half ropes, almost all belayers run one of the ropes between some fingers in order to enhance independent control of the strands.  The skin between the fingers is pretty vulnerable, and it isn't at all hard to get blisters and abrasions there just from ordinary rapid paying out and taking in.  Gloves (but not necessarily fingerless gloves) protect from this as well.

The lower gripping power associated with half ropes and ordinary tube devices makes the consideration of assisted locking devices more consequential.  In this regard, where half ropes are concerned, I think that the Climbing Technology Alpine Up is the clear winner in terms of handling and stopping power.  Jim's tests have revealed that all the assisted lockers have a fall-off in braking "power" for high loads, but the Up is the least bad in this regard, and its half-rope handling is superior to the Mammut Smart Alpine and the Edelrid Jul.

So here's what I'd suggest.  Get a pair of 8.5mm half ropes for your first set.  The Mammut Genesis 8.5's wear like iron and handle well, so are ideal for at least one's first half ropes, but there are plenty of other models out there and some of them are no doubt at least as good and maybe better.  Don't go sub 8.5 your first time around, all the problematic issues with half ropes increase at smaller diameters. You'll have to be more careful than usual about rope management at belays or you will pay a price in tangles.  

Get the CT Alpine Up as your belay gadget.  Practice enough on the ground to learn how to instantly unlock it if it jams when pumping slack to the leader.  (The Alpine Up is the best of the assisted lockers in this handling situation, but it can still lock up if you aren't careful and you want to know how to release it immediately.)  Do some ground practice dealing with handling the strands independently, including the need to briefly pay one strand out while taking the other strand in.  You can do guide belays with the Up.  I rarely use such belays, but  when I do use them the Up seems fine.  Others think the pulling resistance is high, and I am very far from a connoisseur of this practice.  If you are dedicated to guide belays and conclude the Up is uncomfortable for this purpose, get a Gigi plate, which handles better for guide belays than any of the tube-style devices.

Finally, even though it is an assisted locker, use gloves.  All the assisted lockers eventually slip under high loads, and when this happens their performance is not as good as an ATC-XP.  So the day might come when gloves matter, and meanwhile they'll prevent blisters between your fingers and make it easier to handle a device heated by rappelling.

Jim Titt wrote:
This is what I can achieve before the rope starts sliding through my hand, I fall in the above-average category of hand strength (I´m 6 ft, solidly built and bend metal for a living). The Italian Alpine club also reported a ca. 40% loss of braking performance if only one strand of two is loaded.
the options to improve matters especially with thin ropes (I use 7.8´s sometimes) is either add one or two extra belay karabiners between the belay loop and the device OR change to a Climbing Technology Alpine Up.
The ATC XP is measurably still the best performer of the conventional plates, the Reverso and Pivot aren´t as powerful despite what others will no doubt say (they are roughly 10% weaker).
Wearing belay gloves generally reduces the braking perfomance but happily reduces the risk of rope burns which is probably the more desirable. Knitted Kevlar work gloves with rubber palms/fingers will increase the braking performance by 50% or more but the durability is a bit limited as the rubber shreds off.

That is super informative Jim, thanks a bunch for posting. Cheers.

To Mr. Gold or Mr. Titt,

You two seem to have used the Alpine Up a bit. It seems nice (though a bit heavy), but I did notice that the manufacturer states that when rappelling, if the weight of the climber is low or the rope weight below you is high, then unlocking the device to smoothly rappel can be difficult. Can you speak to this at all?

I think Jim has just tested the Alpine Up and doubt he would ever use it.  But I've used mine for several years now.

The potential rappelling problems mentioned by CT occur, I think, with a pair of ropes in the 9mm or bigger range.  I don't have any real problems with a pair of 8.5's.  If the rappel has the entire length of rope hanging straight off the device, then there is enough friction that I have to feed the rope into the device for the first 30 feet or so, but this isn't hard to do and is sometimes even a bit comforting if one is hanging in space with empty space below.

CT does have a kind of kludgy fix that involves running the brake strands through a carabiner clipped to the top of the device so that rope weight doesn't bear directly on the locking mechanism.  The technique works, but in my case seems to make the ropes extra twisty, so I don't do it (but I don't really need it either).

Speaking of extra twisty, I do get more twisting from the Up than from an ordinary plate.                                          

I tested the BRD but only with thicker ropes (9mm and up) where it´s comparable with the ATC XP but it shines with thick ropes really, a reflection of it´s age probably. And it gets a bit grabby as well, kinda typical of what is really an assisted braking device but only with a half-hearted way of overiding the locking up. A solid deice for sure and I wouldn´t object to using one but I wouldn´t choose to either! The DMM bug was the best small-rope device available in it´s time but was discontinued a long time ago, it´s miniscule size did mean it got alarmingly hot on long rappels which isn´t a good feature for a device designed for multi-pitch adventures.
I did try rapping on the Alpine Up, even with my substantal weight (87kg)  using a doubled 10mm it was neither a pleasant or controllable experience and the CT work-round was so complicated I gave up and reverted to a karabiner brake.

Jim Titt wrote: The DMM bug was the best small-rope device available in it´s time but was discontinued a long time ago, it´s miniscule size did mean it got alarmingly hot on long rappels which isn´t a good feature for a device designed for multi-pitch adventures.

Do you mean the DMM Bugette? The DMM Bug is a different device and it hasn't been discontinued. I still have a Bugette and I agree with you that it works really well for skinny ropes. I much prefer it to my ATC XP for that purpose.

That was Jim copying my mistake when I said the DMM Bug.  I meant the Bugette and so did he.

I find the alpine up a right pain on 8.5mm well used ropes. Too much friction. On thinner ropes it is excellent. The two locker thing for normal devices is really worth knowing, especially when using double ropes for the first time, for thin ropes and for those with weaker hands or less experience of holding unexpected falls. 

rgold wrote: As for gloves,  the climbing world is divided into people who have burned their hands belaying and those who haven't yet had that experience.  Most of those who haven't been burned haven't been presented with a severe enough fall (such falls are rare), but a few exceptional belayers might be so good at handling the belay that they truly can avoid burns even in severe cases.  If you are convinced you are one of those super belayers, go barehanded, but common sense suggests gloves, at least for multipitch situations with severe fall potential.  Even if gloves make it more likely that the rope might run a bit, I don't think the advantage of a better barehanded grip outweighs the potential for hand injury and possible loss of control if you turn out not to be a super belayer after all.  

We've gone around on this here a bunch of times before and I certainly don't consider myself a "super belayer" in any way shape or form. I've always strongly disliked having anything between the rope and my hands yet I've never had a rope slip through a plate/ATC device more than an inch or two and never had a rope slip through or burn my hand despite holding lots of long, hard falls on a variety of plate/ATC designs. I can only chalk it up to the fact that I have the belay biner through my harness loops which orients the device 90 degrees from having it on the belay loop. I do that because the rope then exits the device to the right very close to my hip rather than exiting the device straight down and the device way extended on the belay loop. I then basically never break falls with just the device/hand combo, but rather with the rope over my hip which adds quite a bit of friction to the mix. This rope path basically/sort of mimics the path the rope takes when hip belaying with a single non-locking biner. I'm guessing the fact I always brake over my hip combined with the sharper, more 90-degree rope angle/path and from having the device closer on the harness loops vs extended out on the belay loop accounts for the disparity between my experience and yours and Jim's testing.

And I've used 9.8-.9 ropes for a long time now though and am generally disinclined to climb on smaller diameters than about 9.6 because I start experiencing belay rope-handling dynamics I really don't care for even when paired with an ATC designed for smaller diameter ropes. I'll deal with 8.5-.8 half ropes when necessary though I am super careful about my hand/finger/rope interactions when using them and carefully pair them with a device which works better with those diameters.  And while I do get the strong incentive to go with thin-diameter, light-weight cords which come with 70m+ ropes and running pitches together, I have so far been similarly disinclined to make that change as well, though more because of rope soloing related issues than anything else.  

And while I think that thinner rope diameters pose serious belaying issues on their own, you and Jim have been talking about this holding-power/drop-test/glove issue going as far back as prehistoric 11mm days so I'm generally always at a loss as to what to make of the whole affair when it comes up. In general, I consider the super thin 70m lead line thing somewhat faddish and unnecessary except at high levels of sport/sprad climbing on bigger walls like Potrero, certain Euro crags and places like Potrero, otherwise, I think they introduce enough downsides along with the positive that, at least in trad climbing, I just don't go there.

As a cautionary side note on long skinny ropes and running pitches together, a friend broke her foot/ankle following two run-together pitches with the full length of a skinny 70m rope out. Her foot popped off a chip about 25-30 above the belay ledge and she basically free-fell onto the ledge from all the rope slack.

P.S. Also not sure I've done anything much scarier than doing a long set of rappels on 7.8mm twins with a Bugette which I really didn't like - at all - as it had me in a permanent paranoid, super-heightened alert state until on the ground again and even throwing a single leg wrap in the mix didn't alleviate the anxiety which it normally always does.

Rgold: do you use palm-up brake hand with the alpine-up?

Can't post in detail because I'm currently tent bound and should be sleeping before a big climbing day tomorrow.... But I do want to add something.

I've often had my doubts about the often repeated "adding a biner" to increase friction . It really isn't as simple as suggested and can readily depend on the biner(s) radiuses and profile.  A single skinny I-beam biner can give more friction than two because of the effective rope radius.

I got to try this out for while rescue abseiling a month or so ago.  More biners (3or4) really did very little.

With a skinny new rope on a single strand rappel I really needed more fiction for the weight of two people.

My solution was a Z clipped setup between my extended belay device, my harness and back to the belay biner. So as well as the DMM bug I had 3 180degree bends rather than the usual 1.

Friction was very nice after that! :-)

MBK, I do use the palm-up hand position with the Alpine Up.  The palm-up grip is weaker yet, but allows me to handle double ropes more effectively.  I wouldn't be comfortable using a palm-up grip with a tube-style device and half ropes, but feel ok about it with assisted braking.

David Coley, perhaps the devil is in the "well-used" part of your statement?  All I can say is I haven't had anything I'd call a problem with Mammut Genesis 8.5's.

Joe, yes, we have been going round and round about this forever, with neither of us really changing our positions.  The fact that you have your device oriented differently than most people and that you manage to keep your brake hand far enough away from the plate to engage your hip in the braking process---whereas as the vast majority of belayers I've observed have their brake hand inches from the plate---already makes you an outlier in terms of technique, whether you are will to accept the superhero status or not.  And there is always the possibility that if we test your grip, it might be exceptional as well.  Meanwhile, there is variety of tests, done all over the world in all kinds of different conditions, and by no means done by just by Jim and I, that suggests that many if not most belayers will experience some running of the rope with high fall-factor falls with little system friction. It is up to everyone to arrive at their own conclusions on this, and plenty of people, maybe even a majority, have elected to belay bare-handed.
 

Gloves: I’ve regularly used two types of belay gloves. Some of my user experience ...

Metolius 3/4 finger - Used for years.  A little bulky-feeling for me plus I think relatively low friction compared to bare hands.  Felt like a dish rag. But good skin protection and can still use finger tips during other miscellaneous tasks (e.g., knot tying).

Petzl Cordex Lightweight full finger - Have been using them for 4 months. Great protection and very grippy. To me, these feel at least as good as bare-handed belay for grip though I have not the data to support.  May wear out faster than the Metolius ones. Anyway,  I usually take off these full-finger gloves for fingertip tasks outside of belaying or rappelling.

patto wrote: 
I've often had my doubts about the often repeated "adding a biner" to increase friction . It really isn't as simple as suggested and can readily depend on the biner(s) radiuses and profile.  A single skinny I-beam biner can give more friction than two because of the effective rope radius.

Admittedly I´ve never tested an I-beam karabiner on a belay device since they are generally a poor choice all round but with the more normal 12mm round stock karabiners you can expect something in the order of 50% more braking force with two and double with three, depending on the rope and device of course. The DMM Bug actually has a claim to fame, it´s the lowest braking force conventional device I´ve ever tested  

David:  I have also had problems rapping with the Alpine Up on 8.5 mm ropes if they are hanging free for most of their length.  I have found that by using the hand that is on the release lever to push the device slightly up and towards the ropes I can significantly decrease the initial stickiness.  I think this works much better than Climbing Technology's solution with an additional biner lifting the ropes into it.

David Coley wrote: I find the alpine up a right pain on 8.5mm well used ropes. Too much friction. On thinner ropes it is excellent. The two locker thing for normal devices is really worth knowing, especially when using double ropes for the first time, for thin ropes and for those with weaker hands or less experience of holding unexpected falls. 

Are using the spring loaded lever and pulling down on it as far is it will go? I regularly rap with my 9.7mm  and old fat 9.8 ropes without much issue. On the fatter rope, I might have to feed the rope a little bit for the first 20' or so, but it's hard to imagine this problem occuring on 8.5mm ropes. I've also used it a few times with my skinny 9.2 rope and it was super smooth handling. 

I have friends who like the Alpine Up for belaying but aren't fond of the rappelling experience with ropes near or at the 10mm diameter.  They use the device in non-locking mode for rappelling and install a prussik backup as usual.

rgold wrote:
David Coley, perhaps the devil is in the "well-used" part of your statement?  All I can say is I haven't had anything I'd call a problem with Mammut Genesis 8.5's.

 

Yep. My well used I mean fat and furry and possibly stiff with sea water. Possibly comes out as 9.5mm

eli poss wrote:

Are using the spring loaded lever and pulling down on it as far is it will go? I regularly rap with my 9.7mm  and old fat 9.8 ropes without much issue. On the fatter rope, I might have to feed the rope a little bit for the first 20' or so, but it's hard to imagine this problem occuring on 8.5mm ropes. I've also used it a few times with my skinny 9.2 rope and it was super smooth handling. 

I don't think I mentioned rapping. Guide mode is the issue. A reverso can have a similar problem with fatter ropes. 

Yes, when using half-rope technique (alternating clips) one rope will more than likely take the brunt of the fall. This is not a problem as long as you're using the right belay device with the right rope(s) (which is always an important consideration in climbing.) Personally, I use the Mammut Genesis 8.5s, coupled with the Edelrid Jul and "The Bruce" steel belay biner. I use this system with my partner for sport, trad, and multipitch and it has proven very safe, effective, and versatile. 

David Coley wrote:

I don't think I mentioned rapping. Guide mode is the issue. A reverso can have a similar problem with fatter ropes. 

Oh...I misunderstood too.  I use guide mode so infrequently I don't have a good read on performance.  When I have used it with my 8.5 Genesis lines, I don't recall any particular difficulty, but I think Jim rated the Alpine Up as one of the worst for pull-through resistance in guide mode.

I have at least tried most of the popular devices in their guide mode function and have concluded that if I really intended to use guide mode more than occasionally, I'd carry a Gigi in addition to any of the other gadgets.