"Escaping the Belay" is not a thing

Let's hear it folks: All kinds of people are contending that the ability for the second to "escape the belay" and (somehow) come to the aid of a fallen and incapacitated leader they cannot lower to the anchor is a "thing" that is a fundamental skill people should learn?

Maybe some one can share their experience with this Unicorn that (while theoretically possible) actually comes up against reality in practice and is so rare as to not be a thing.

Your follower got injured below you and you need to check on them - airway, position, etc. Not to mention stabilizing a musculoskeletal injury. Whether you raise them to the belay or lower them isn't always obvious.

Also a leader stranded and run out may want a line lowered from above - I've actually done this lol.

Took my young buddy Joe top-roping for his first time...he must've been 4 or 5....he loved the up, but froze on the down. Stuck on a ledge, he began counting passing cars on the road below, looking at clouds, but wouldn't answer me and wouldn't come down. So, while I wasn't anchored to the ground, I had to ascend the rope, retrieve my little buddy and come back to earth. The situation mimics a leader who fell above her last piece, is now sitting broken on a ledge, unwilling to be lowered or something....It's sort of escaping the belay, not totally in the sense you describe. You're right, luckily, "escaping the belay" and ascending isn't such a common thing....but it happens for sure....

Of note: Joe is now a national team kid and one of the fastest speed climbers in the US. He doesn't climb with me any more. I'm entitled to half his earnings, I think. He doesn't answer my texts. Damn kid.

GDavis Davis wrote: Your follower got injured below you and you need to check on them - airway, position, etc. Not to mention stabilizing a musculoskeletal injury. Whether you raise them to the belay or lower them isn't always obvious.

Also a leader stranded and run out may want a line lowered from above - I've actually done this lol.

We are not talking about the second needing an assist but about assisting the leader. 

coppolillo wrote: Took my young buddy Joe top-roping for his first time...he must've been 4 or 5....he loved the up, but froze on the down. Stuck on a ledge, he began counting passing cars on the road below, looking at clouds, but wouldn't answer me and wouldn't come down. So, while I wasn't anchored to the ground, I had to ascend the rope, retrieve my little buddy and come back to earth. The situation mimics a leader who fell above her last piece, is now sitting broken on a ledge, unwilling to be lowered or something....It's sort of escaping the belay, not totally in the sense you describe. You're right, luckily, "escaping the belay" and ascending isn't such a common thing....but it happens for sure....

Of note: Joe is now a national team kid and one of the fastest speed climbers in the US. He doesn't climb with me any more. I'm entitled to half his earnings, I think. He doesn't answer my texts. Damn kid.

We are not talking about TRing where there is a bomber anchor above.

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

We are not talking about the second.

You have essentially asked a two part question: a) who's had to escape the belay (the skill itself), and b) who's had to do it to rescue a leader (the rare situation).

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

We are not talking about TRing where there is a bomber anchor above.

"The situation mimics a leader who fell above her last piece, is now sitting broken on a ledge"

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

We are not talking about TRing where there is a bomber anchor above.

isn't this moving the goal post?

If the leader were to take a fall onto a ledge, and be incapacitated, this is a useful skill.  Most often it ends up being on TR and is just someone scared to come down.  While it is very unlikely, being prepared can save lives.  

Knowing how to effectively triage, stabilize and treat any injury that a leader who CANNOT SELF-RESCUE will always be more important than escaping the belay even if it is desirable.  So you're money is better spent on WEMT/advanced remote medical treatment and practice than any idealized self-rescue skills.  Otherwise you're showing up to a mess that you can't fix.  

No, not a "bomb" anchor above....but a couple thoughts: if the leader fell on the piece, it's been tested, hopefully (probably?!) good. If he can communicate with you, maybe he'll say, "Don't come up the rope, it's a frickin' RP!" But he might say, it's a bomber gold cam, all good! Another technique to manage this: if the leader is conscious/capable, he either places a piece where he is, or lowers to the next piece, attaches a friction hitch from the piece to the belayer's side of the rope and cinches it tight---now the leader is ascending with his weight on that piece backed up by the top piece---not ideal, but it might limit extension/etc if the top piece fails/etc.

Yeah, none of this is super likely, but every so often you hear about it....

Isn't being prepared for an unlikely event a good thing? Or is it a complete waste of time because it could never happen? Escaping the belay isn't particularly difficult to learn, doesn't require practice to remember the concept, so why wouldn't you want to know how to do it?

maybe we can ask the original question differently-- has the ability to escape the belay and help the incapacitated leader ever occurred in real life incident and led to a dramatically different outcome for the injured party? My guess is no. 

My dear Boondoggle, you are forgetting that the first step of escaping a belay is the all important task of tying off a belay. Critical to taking pics!

I learned side by side with my SAR son, so, I learned, or was the crash test dummy, for all sorts of stuff, most of it not done again, including escaping a belay.

No, I've never escaped a belay at need, but? Learning some things did up my skills. How? Understanding there is more than one way to do something, and the best piece of equipment is your head. Yeah, I bring it up every chance I get, but, learning a prussik hitch ascend, literally first thing I ever did, gave me a really simple tool that can be widely applied, including escaping a belay.

I doubt escaping a belay will ever be needed. But? Thinking a situation through, and having even a few skills? That, I definitely have used, including self rescuing...while routesetting at the gym, lol!

Best, Helen

EDIT to add, on single pitch, aren't you essentially on top rope, wherever you fall off? The top gear or bolt isn't an anchor, true, but it's still the top of the rope between climber and belayer, and maybe okay to lower from. Climber "stuck" up there, somehow, is kinda unlikely. I've climbed, lowered, climbed, with a brassy as the highest bit.

Leader should have escaped the belay in this situation, and then walked down the cliff and off to Rock & Snow to sell off his gear. Along with everybody else involved.

Noah R wrote:

"The situation mimics a leader who fell above her last piece, is now sitting broken on a ledge"

Gotta say it. Read much?

Lol. Do you?

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

Lol. Do you?

A leader that has fallen is not below a TR anchor but instead may be hanging from marginal protection.

No shit... that is why the word mimic was used, rather than equivalent/identical. Situation is still similar (not identical)

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

We are not talking about the second.

The plural second person, nice. We went back and read it and we understand it now. We thank you.

it will be interesting to see if anybody has ever run into the full meal deal of this situation.  i can only recall 2 incidents in my career that were remotely close to this situation.  and they really weren't that close, to be honest with you.  other cases that i am most familiar with are similar to my case #1.  i have also heard of a few cases where the leader fell and was injured bad enough such that the belayer had to secure the leader, and then bail to get help.  but again, that is different than fully self-rescuing both members when one is completely limp.

1) partner got hit by rockfall from above while he was belaying me up to him.  broken ribs, ruptured spleen, etc.  he was able to pull up a bit of slack and clove hitch it to his (somewhat suboptimal) anchor.  i used my atc with some backup knots to essentially TR solo the line to get up to him.  we were about 1000 feet up a 2500 foot low to mid 5th class alpine choss pile.  we were able to tediously lower/downclimb.  it was awful, but still not really close to a full meal deal scenario.

2) i had led a pitch that had a roof crack, didn't have the right piece of gear to "plug" the end of the roof crack.  needless to say the rope got stuck as the second was coming up, so fixed the line, rapped the backside strand down to the roof, set myself in a crappy hanging belay where i could keep pulling the rope out of the roof.  sub-optimal, but again not anywhere near the full meal deal scenario.

i think having the general knowledge of being able to escape the belay is a good thing.  it helps you really have a better understanding of the rope as a tool.  but i generally agree with the OP in that if you are ever in a real situation where you need to do this you are pretty f'd.

Since we're still on page 1 (edit: this shit went to page 2 as I typed this), I'll say that this conversation is rapidly heading nowhere lacking a definition for "escaping the belay." If by this we mean removing the belayer from the belay system and securing the rope to some anchor point, I'll (begrudgingly) agree with the OP--this is kinda useless. If by this we simply mean the belaying leaving the anchor to do a thing while the climber is somehow secured, well, coppolillo offers a good example. Since I tend to belay followers directly from the anchor, that belay is already "escaped." In the particular situation of an injured follower, I'm more like to "un-escape" (capture?) the belay, by converting to a counter-balance lower and just descending to the injured follower, then continuing down as appropriate.

For the leader, coppolillo's example illustrates this nicely. Climbing up the rope is also incredibly easy to achieve if belaying with a GriGri, is a doable pain in the ass if using a plaquette, and may be relatively simple with other ABDs depending on the specifics. Hell, the belayer can probably even leave a lot of the gear in the pitch as they ascend--the belayer may only need to get up high enough so it's possible to lower the leader to them.

@luke smith:
While I agree without medical skills "you're showing up to a mess that you can't fix," if you lack the ability to get to the mess in the first place, you're trying to treat a mess you can't reach. You need both skill sets. And frankly, triaging, stabilizing, and treating may not be effectively accomplished for the long duration typically required for an evac beyond EMS without a bit of rescue first. Aside from tourniquet or other bleeding intervention, I'm having a difficult time imagining an intervention that couldn't probably wait 10 or 20 minutes that wouldn't be made much easier and likely more effective if on a ledge instead of hanging on the rope. For anything else that can't wait (CPR, rescue breathing, loss of consciousness, etc.), that patient will likely die prior to reaching definitive care anyway (though I've been on a few rescues that surprised me, and obviously it's still worth attempting interventions barring signs incompatible with life).

It's a skill that overlaps with other skills, so why not learn it? Knowing how to transfer loads comes up in aid climbing. The mule knot is probably something you never really need but it's easy enough to learn.

But it's definitely not necessary to carry specialized gear for the specific case of escaping.