Self rescue scenario: incapacitated belayer

I thought of an interesting self-rescue scenario while climbing yesterday.

The crag is remote and hard to access. The routes are hard, overhanging, single-pitch sport routes with plentiful choss. You're on lead. You break a hold. The rock hits and incapacitates your belayer. Fortunately they're using a grigri, which catches your fall. You're okay, but your belayer is unresponsive. Nobody else is at the crag to take over the belay. What to do?

Best-case solution: Fix the rope to the nearest bolt or piece. Descend the rope using friction hitches or the like.

Complicating factors: What if you're sport climbing and don't have any gear on you to descend the rope? What if you fall off an overhang into space, and cannot jug or boink back onto the wall?

Preventing the first complication is easy enough: carry extra cord, slings, and biners when climbing somewhere remote and/or with suspect rock quality. Annoying if it's a single pitch sport crag and you're redpointing a project, but probably worth it.

I'm a bit stumped on the second complication. Any ideas? Better solutions in general? 

Perhaps some of your questions are covered here -
https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/118571579/escape-room-sport-climbing-edition

Or here -
https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/118617977/what-to-do-if-you-belayer-becomes-incapacitated

It’s a trick question. There are no hard, overhanging, single-pitch sport routes with plentiful choss that are remote and hard to access! ;)

• Don't incapacitate your belayer in such a situation. This should be the first rule of thumb.
• Bring a 3rd person?
• Prussik back up to top bolt, if left hanging. Use your shoe laces if you have to; improvise, adapt, overcome.
• Tie end of rope off to a bolt and rap off.
• If you killed your belayer take a trophy video and post it to internet. 
• Do not reveal location to authorities ever, no matter what. If necessary use an improvised sled or tarp to drag the body away from project and to a more popular area. 
• Hide all the evidence.
• Maybe this is the time to sail off to Australia?

I usually have an ATC-Guide and prussik cord on me at all times, as well as alpine draws, so I'd be able to ascend/descend the rope after fixing it to a draw.  Theoretically.  It's not like I've practiced doing this.

Set the ATC up in guide mode on your belay loop to capture upward progress (might need a prussik/foot sling above to unweight the rope).  Use the prussik and sling (from the alpine draw) as a foot step to pull the ATC up the rope.  Once at the overhanging draw, go in direct and fix the rope with a clove hitch (or whatever you'd like).  Now, use the ATC and prussik to rap down to your partner, fumbling around to unclip the draws along the way so you can pass them.

Love thinking through stuff like this! What about using a prusik to ascend your end of the rope to the last bolt, fix the rope, and decent the other side like you mentioned? I imagine that would make it even easier to fix the line since you'll have some slack to play with after ascending.

if you have one carabiner, you have enough gear to descend the rope (munter)...... if you've practiced before, body rappel. honestly, when you're leading it should be really easy because you already have all the gear. even a sport rack is beyond sufficient.

also, why can't you jug back up if you've fallen into an overhang? again, even with a sport rack this should be doable. though my sport rack always inlcudes at least 2 alpine draws, which would be sufficient to ascend the rope.

chris blatchley wrote: if you have one carabiner, you have enough gear to descend the rope (munter)...... if you've practiced before, body rappel. honestly, when you're leading it should be really easy because you already have all the gear. even a sport rack is beyond sufficient.

How would you use a munter to descend a rope that has tension on it? 

Nick Sweeney wrote:

How would you use a munter to descend a rope that has tension on it? 

get back to a place where i can unweight the rope. rope ascension or more climbing if not overhanging.

amarius wrote: Perhaps some of your questions are covered here -
https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/118571579/escape-room-sport-climbing-edition

Or here -
https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/118617977/what-to-do-if-you-belayer-becomes-incapacitated

Wow those threads got serious. I should have been hanging around MP more during quarantine.

Sorry for the duplicate. 

csproul wrote: It’s a trick question. There are no hard, overhanging, single-pitch sport routes with plentiful choss that are remote and hard to access! ;)

Definitely not in NC anyway

chris blatchley wrote:

get back to a place where i can unweight the rope. rope ascension or more climbing if not overhanging.

Per OP, you're hanging from a bolt on an hard overhanging route.  Your belayer's grigri is holding tension from below. Your solution doesn't apply to this scenario.

climb the rope to the bolt, fix the rope, descend the rope...

Nick Sweeney wrote:

Per OP, you're hanging from a bolt on an hard overhanging route.  Your belayer's grigri is holding tension from below. Your solution doesn't apply to this scenario.

once the tension is gone, the grigri would be unlocked and you could pull slack through - enough to rap off climber's side maybe.

sanz wrote: Sorry for the duplicate. 

I don't care if there is thread duplication. Keep in mind - since those threads are relatively recent, and some of the replies quite extensive, you are not likely to get a whole lot of serious responses here. It is going to gently transition into memes, jokes, and goatz in another page or so.

See, If your belayer had just used an ATC, you’d be down already...

Great example of a situation where you should have told someone where you're going and when to expect you back. That might not save your belayer when quicker medical attention would have though.

This is not a thing.

id fix the rope to a bolt and then decend the rope with my hands and legs. easier to rappel without a harness than one might expect as long as you have decent grip strength

Post on Instagram. Call it an alpine route for extra attention.

Edelweiss makes a 3mm cord rated for 3.2 KN, which if I'm thinking straight is about 700 pounds-force. Use them for shoe laces, you'll always have something to rig prussics with. Yeah they're thin. just don't bounce around a lot. Of course the weak point will be at the knot, either the prussic knot itself, or the knot you tied to make a loop out of your shoe lace. Worst case scenario is that you fall back down to where you started, hanging from your last bolt.

Intuitively, I suspect that a klemheist knot would be easier on the cord than a prussic. As an aside, the klemheist works well using 3/8 inch NYLON webbing, where the prussic sucks. Caveat: I've used this knot on a pair of 8.5's, but never on a single one the new skinny cords. so YMMV.

When you're up at the bolt rigging the belayer's side of the rope to rap on, best not to drop it.

The ideal scenario is that your belayer comes to and still has enough neurons to rub together to work the gri-gri.