Different size biners for alpine draws

Colin O'Brien wrote: Camp used to sell alpine draws with a photon on one side, and nano on the other. I got 5 on closeout, and I’ve climbed on them for about 10 years now, and they have pros and cons.  First - both biners actually fit through each other.  The photon can slide through the smaller nano, which makes reracking a non issue.  The smaller gear biner, the nano, is a little more fiddly to clip to gear sometimes, but in some cracks it plays a little nicer with the rock. With ice, the nanos are a little harder to clip with gloves on.  They are lighter, for sure.  I would say 95% of the time I don’t think about the different size biners.  I have zero preference between alpine draws that are mixed, and draws with two of the same biner, as long as they are full size.

For my alpine draws, I rack BD Dynex slings with racking/gear biner being the Nano, rope side is Photon (word for word, you nailed my opinion for weight and pros/cons)...far as I've played with them, the Photon no longer fits through the Nano without some jankery. Typically my 2nd will show up with them over their shoulder and we have to rerack them anyway, so it's really not that big a deal IMO.

Mark Pilate wrote:  weight savings overrides the complexity.  

Whenever I start obsessing over weight, I read this to keep things in perspective. 

I have separate rope/gear biners because I use my alpine draws on bolted slab routes and I DO take lead falls on them. Most of the gear side biners have some nasty gouges in them and I'm too lazy to find that one and sand it smooth later. Black is gear, silver is rope side. Dead easy to keep track of.

I use nanos on the gear side, but found their narrow radius for the rope basket did make for more drag (I frequently link pitches up to 70m on moderates). I have WC astros for the rope side which has a much larger radius, rope runs through smoother. They also have tabs on the nose of the biner which keep the gate from rubbing against the rock, reducing chance of it being pushed open while catching a fall if the biner had been pulled above the bolt/gear (minimal I know, but hey if it gives you a fuzzy feeling). I also find them a lot easier to clip the rope through. Those biners are just barely bigger than the nano though, you can slide them through either way. I tried a nano and photon combo before, it was a PITA only being able to combine them one way, I don't recommend going with that much a difference.

If your response to this question was about hangboarding or climbing more, drop the strawman arguments. Not everyone does roadside cragging their whole life. Say you're schlepping a weeks worth of gear into the bugs, damn straight those few grams off the rack matter when you add them up. Go from the onset thinking about the little details and you can afford to haul in more creature comforts that make a trip a hell of a lot more enjoyable. Or if you're linking up some grade III/IV routes going car to car, yes your feet and knees appreciate anything you can shed. Being able to get it all in an 18-22L pack makes the climbing more fun also.  
PS. I did max hangs this morning, come at me bro. 

I like nanos on one end of my alpine draws and photons on the other. It's just a weight savings thing. If I could run nanos on both ends without creating excess rope drag I would, but I haven't found that to work really well. It has nothing to do with one fitting through the other, since, obviously, you can put a photon through a nano just as easily as vice versa if you just turn the thing sideways...

SethG wrote: Pro tip: when I want to slide one carabiner through another one of the same size, I get good results by turning one of the carabiners sideways.

Dallin Carey wrote:

Whenever I start obsessing over weight, I read this to keep things in perspective. 

Read the article.  No offense to Marc, but it seemed more spray than useful info.  Yeah, get better.  Never thought of that.  And at the end of it all, it killed him at 25.  Leaves a credibility gap. Regardless of your level, unless your name is Honnold, you’re gonna carry some gear.   Why not carry the lightest and least?  No need to “obsess” about it.  I can ALWAYS get better and fitter and more confident, and train, and fingerboard, etc.  yadda yadda.  But until I reach perfection in two more years, I’ll go as light as possible and mix my draw biners for;

1. Weight and clip-ability considerations
2. Versatility for other than strictly alpine
3. Ease of quick identification 
4. Less rope wear 
5. Racking Space on gear loop or sling
6.  Save money maybe

Others may choose to keep it simple and universal...still good.  

The OP has his info.  Regardless how he or anyone chooses, they should not give up on getting better, climbing more efficiently, or getting fitter....those are parallel pursuits. 

Nearly all of my draws, quick or alpine, have silver or gray Oz carabiners on the top end and orange Hoodwires on the bottom.  I have a few long alpine draws that I leave older Nano 22s on both ends but I don't reach for those very often, the weight difference is noticeable but I really don't like the small size of the Nano.  I've got a few Petzl Anges in my rack as well but haven't had a reason to switch over from the BD hooded carabiners.  As others have said, I prefer to keep the silver or gray carabiners on the top side of my draw for clipping gear or bolts and keep the colored carabiner on the rope end.

No matter how I have them configured I've been able to pass either carabiner through the other to triple up the alpine draws.  I very much prefer a clean nose on my carabiners and have a preference for wire gates since they get used in snow and ice.  There are some carabiners that are pretty nice but the BDs are easy to get and are affordable while still ticking the boxes for my other preferences.

My preference for the gear end of an alpine draw is the camp Dyon...the nose is super thin, with no notch to hang up. Very easy to snag a wire nut deep in a crack. The rope end is a DMM wire gate or Camp Photon or a BD Hotwire.  I have been experimenting with the Petzl Ange...jury is still out. They are light but harder to clip for me. 

Dallin Carey wrote:

Whenever I start obsessing over weight, I read this to keep things in perspective. 

There are reasons other than just speed to cut weight. I'll never be fast in the mountains. However, changing from BD Neutrinos to Camp Nanos for most of the racking and draws is a 14 gram per carabiner savings. And costs me almost nothing. Across a total of 40 carabiners that's a savings of 20 ounces. That's room for a hell of a burrito for lunch. 

To the dude who said that Marc got killed from the tips in his article. Get fucked. You obviously don't know what went down, they were swept off the descent by an avy.

And Marc's tips were far from spray. I climb with plenty of people who can easily redpoint 5.12 sport routes but sewing machine leg on 5.7 trad, so the tip of feeling confident onsighting and running out easy shit is a very legitimate tip. As with all the others like minimizing belay change over time and reasons to stop those are some of easiest ways to get faster with ZERO effort. Yet you see it being done by gumbies to trad dads all the time.

Bit of a party trick perhaps, but you don't need to pass one carabiner through the other in order to rig an alpine draw.  Starting with the extended sling, clip the lower carabiner through both strands just below the upper carabiner.  This forms a loop below  Grab this loop and clip it to the upper carabiner and your draw is (re)rigged.

The party trick actually has a useful application: it is an effective one-handed way to reconstitute an extended draw after you've cleaned it and it is clipped to a cleaning sling or your harness.

Since you can only discuss the “ins and outs” of draw biners for so long, I’ll start the thread drift along tangents and go back and address forthright.....and I can already tell this will be TL:DR and controversial. 

Forthright -  I can appreciate your sentiments, but I stand behind my post.  I did not mean that the tips in that specific article killed him on that specific climb, but I think you are mistaken if you think that his climbing techniques and philosophy were not responsible for, or at least contributory to, his untimely death.  To be sure, he was by all accounts a great person, and he was unquestionably highly skilled and talented.  His death was a tragedy and loss not just for his family, but for climbing in general.

However, (and you may or may not agree with me on this) but climbers – and especially sponsored or professional/semi-professional climbers – are effectively “organ donors” to the community when they die climbing on public lands.  They do not suddenly become above reproach or analysis, no matter how awesome a person or climber they were in life.  

his advice, IMO, in that article was superfluous at best and at worst, more likely to get someone else F’d if they follow it.  Maybe it wasn’t intentional spray and was written due to pressure from sponsors, etc etc who knows, but the “Tips” you cited as valuable, to me sounded more along the lines of  “no shit”, or “how to be rich:  Saving money is for chumps, First just get a million dollars, and then you….should be soloing 5.10 like me in the pics here”.   Do you think your 5.12 sport friend said to himself “ yeah, don’t know what I was thinking before, no more Elvis on trad for me, I’m soloing anything under 5.11 now and getting way better.   Does he have a wife and kid?  or is Go Fund Me sufficient?  Hell, it’s worth it as long as he gets faster and no one mistakes him for a gumby or Trad dad right?   A dude’s gotta climb.

Sure speed is safety sometimes, but just getting faster for its own sake and by cutting other margins may not be the best advice.  

I use whatever biners are available.  Rarely do the same biners stay on a alpine draw for long before being taken off and used elsewhere. 

Buck Rio's post mentioned the issue of burrs developing on carabiners used for clipping metal gear like bolt hangers, pitons, ice screws, or wires.  DMM has some sobering video on line of testing that they performed on such carabiners -- their video footage shows that the burrs do far more than just fuzz a rope, even producing total mantle/sheath rupture with repeated falls.   For me, this is a strong argument to rig my "alpine" draws the same as my "sport" draws, with a noticeably smaller carabiner like a nano, on the "gear end", and a larger carabiner with a more generous rope basket for the "rope end".  The palpable size differential makes it a "no-brainer" tell which end is which, even without looking at the draw.

Mark Pilate wrote:

Read the article.  No offense to Marc, but it seemed more spray than useful info.  Yeah, get better.  Never thought of that.  And at the end of it all, it killed him at 25.  Leaves a credibility gap. Regardless of your level, unless your name is Honnold, you’re gonna carry some gear.   Why not carry the lightest and least?  No need to “obsess” about it.  I can ALWAYS get better and fitter and more confident, and train, and fingerboard, etc.  yadda yadda.  But until I reach perfection in two more years, I’ll go as light as possible and mix my draw biners for;

1. Weight and clip-ability considerations
2. Versatility for other than strictly alpine
3. Ease of quick identification 
4. Less rope wear 
5. Racking Space on gear loop or sling
6.  Save money maybe

Others may choose to keep it simple and universal...still good.  

The OP has his info.  Regardless how he or anyone chooses, they should not give up on getting better, climbing more efficiently, or getting fitter....those are parallel pursuits. 

There's a credibility gap here but I don't think it lies with Marc. Use the gear that floats your boat. I'm of the mindset that lighter is better but there's still plenty of my gear that could be switched out for lighter options. Wanna get competent in the alpine, go put in mileage. No spray just solid advice. Nothing wrong with nerding out on gear, but at the end of the day it's not the gear holding you back.

Jake - have you ever heard a climber complain that it’s his gear that’s keeping him down?  I haven’t.   Ever met one that didn’t want to get out more?   I haven’t.  Ever met one that didn’t spend time optimizing their rig?  I haven’t.  

If you think “get more mileage in the alpine” is piercing insight, then You might not have heard about “when in doubt, run it out”.   Wanna get better at leading? Do more leading.  The best training for climbing is climbing.  If you bring Bivi gear, you’ll use it.  Sometimes moving at night/early is best to avoid crevasses and rockfall....I got hundreds of platitudes.  Except now “light is right “ is for gumbies that don’t free solo 5.10.  I’ll cross that one out.  That’s  just holding me back

I use the Petzl ange biners for alpine draws with the small one on the gear side. The large one can pass though the small one with no issues so logistically it isn’t an issue having different sizes.

My WC Heliums clip and handle so well, that I don't mind the extra weight for a 33g biner. They're also stronger than all the ultralights, except maybe the ange/dyon lineup. 

wisam wrote:
I use the Petzl ange biners for alpine draws with the small one on the gear side. The large one can pass though the small one with no issues so logistically it isn’t an issue having different sizes.

How do you like the Ange? I bought 5 of each and have them rigged the same way, but haven't used them yet. Clipping them takes some getting used to, since the gate opening is configured differently.