Passive-Only Trad Anchor

Hey guys, I am a fledging trad climber. I have about 60 nuts and hexes going up to Camalot #3, but no cams. Honestly, I appreciate the history of passive protection, and would like to stay passive. Can anyone tell me how to safely build a trad anchor out of only passive pro? I am assuming that only placing the nuts downward would be awful during a hard catch. (You don't have to tell me how dumb I am for not using cams, my friends already did that for you!)

All-passive anchors sometimes happen even if you have a rack full of cams left on your harness -- or if you ran out while on the pitch.

Depends on the location of the anchor as to specifics, but ideally, you will have at least 3 pieces of pro and at least one of them will be set so that it will catch an upward force (this if you are doing multi pitch: you want the leader to have something besides just your bodyweight to counter a fall that will result in upward force on the anchor-belayer system).

If its a TR setup, maybe the upward-pull piece is less critical.

Many times, I try to set my anchor (passive or cams+passive) at chest level or maybe even above, then extend it so that I have a nice low center of gravity... so that belayers bodyweight will take some force if the leader falls, but a piece of pro that will arrest the upward movement of the belayer if s/he takes a ride.

The construction of your anchor isn't really going to change how hard the catch is-- that will depend more on belayer technique.

Hey Kyle,

I appreciate your attitude of staying passive. However, the fact that you are asking this question on mountain project concerns me about your ability to stay safe while pursuing an idealistic goal. Placing solid passive protection is a highly nuanced skill and needs a lot of practice. Placing a good passive protection on TR is hard enough; safely doing it while leading is advanced. Added to that you have to consider rope drag, run out, the direction of fall etc. using only passive protection, you are definitely asking for trouble. If you are serious about pursuing this goal, I would recommend gaining some experience leading in general with cams. It will give you a better idea of problems you might encounter while leading and how to deal with it. Even better find an experienced mentor or pay a guide. Once you are comfortable leading a certain route grade with your eyes closed, you can consider removing all active pieces.

My 2 cents.

Varun that's a bit hyperbolic. Some areas take passive gear better than cams (Devil's Lake), and many, many routes were put up before cams were invented. Just stay the hell away from Indian Creek...

J pretty much nailed it...your biggest problem is the lack of multidirectional pieces. A nut placed to resist upward pull will handle this, but you have to really know what you are doing. I hope that your partners at least don't share this ethos, as I'd be more concerned about your first piece not being multidirectional and zippering, which would lead to an anchor fall and upward pull...

Basically, YGD.

Yep this just sounds like a zipper waiting to happen

Kyle, no one can "tell you" how to do anything. And your reason for choosing an all passive rack is no more or less stupid than the reasons any of us climb; do what you want. My recommendation is take your rack out, build some anchors 1/2 way up a route you can top rope and test the shit out of it - while you are on TR.

varunr89 wrote:Hey Kyle, I appreciate your attitude of staying passive. However, the fact that you are asking this question on mountain project concerns me about your ability to stay safe while pursuing an idealistic goal. Placing solid passive protection is a highly nuanced skill and needs a lot of practice. Placing a good passive protection on TR is hard enough; safely doing it while leading is advanced. Added to that you have to consider rope drag, run out, the direction of fall etc. using only passive protection, you are definitely asking for trouble. If you are serious about pursuing this goal, I would recommend gaining some experience leading in general with cams. It will give you a better idea of problems you might encounter while leading and how to deal with it. Even better find an experienced mentor or pay a guide. Once you are comfortable leading a certain route grade with your eyes closed, you can consider removing all active pieces. My 2 cents.

What?

Many people learn on passive gear. And people led on passive gear for years before there were cams.

I would disagree that multi-directional pieces cannot be placed using only passive protection. Leuben's rock climbing anchors book covers plenty of strategies to place multi-directional pieces. But, I agree that the OP is not yet experienced enough to do this on his own. Therefore, my earlier statement still stands.

Ted: I diverge from the post but I do not agree with your statement that DL takes passive protection better than cams. I know that there is a whole post dedicated to this. However, the evidence is anecdotal at best and is biased towards old school climbers, who possibly prefer passive protection. I can probably furnish just as many references who will swear by the cam at DL. But that's a discussion for another day.

Merry Christmas!

RMS wrote: What? Many people learn on passive gear. And people led on passive gear for years before there were cams.

My statement had nothing to do with if it is possible to learn with passive gear. It implied that OP needs more experience. And yes people led on passive gear for years before there were cams. People also led on wooden stakes before there were nuts and hexes.

If you have to ask this question, you are not yet knowledgeable enough to actually make an informed choice on going "all passive".

More than anything, my concern with adopting this ideology would be a lack of partners to climb with, because I sure as shit wouldn't climb with someone who intentionally makes less than optimal anchors because of an ideology and I bet many would agree. And you're gonna be a BLAST to follow having to stop and clean 15 nuts that you most likely set in very hard to make sure all your gear doesn't zipper. And I can't WAIT to do unprotected traverses because a multidirectional passive placement wasn't available and I'm in line for a monster swing.

If you go forward with it, good luck, and make sure you have a strong knowledge of directional forces and zippering. And you should tell any potential partner up front before a multipitch, you would be a dick not to.

Personally, I think you should find a friend that shares this mentality (if you can) and just make it a side hobby - and own a set of cams for climbing with everyone else, and for climbing the MANY routes where you will want/need cams to make them not X-rated.

I love placing my nuts both on lead and in anchors, but why the vendetta against active gear? Saying you won't use them just because you like the history of passive gear seems like a pretty poor excuse for me. Do you still use a hemp rope and wear steel-bottom mountaineering boots?

If you want to use all passive gear, that's fine. Just make sure you know how place a nut in an upward constricting crack. Put in three good pieces for downward pull and then place a piece for an upward pull and clip that to the anchor. Leave just enough snack that the anchor can rotate about 170 degrees so that your pro doesn't get yanked upward.

Learn how to place opposed nuts and do that ASAP off the belay, preferably as your first placement

varunr89 wrote:I would disagree that multi-directional pieces cannot be placed using only passive protection. Leuben's rock climbing anchors book covers plenty of strategies to place multi-directional pieces. But, I agree that the OP is not yet experienced enough to do this on his own. Therefore, my earlier statement still stands. Ted: I diverge from the post but I do not agree with your statement that DL takes passive protection better than cams. I know that there is a whole post dedicated to this. However, the evidence is anecdotal at best and is biased towards old school climbers, who possibly prefer passive protection. I can probably furnish just as many references who will swear by the cam at DL. But that's a discussion for another day. Merry Christmas!

For the record, I have argued very strongly in favor of using cams at DL. The nature of the rock, however, lends itself to more bomber passive placements, as there are a ton of constrictions and very few truly parallel cracks. Many routes can be safely led without cams, so if the TS climbs at a place like that, I could see the all-passive approach working.

I've already commented here once but I'm just going to say please get 3 or 4 cams. Place one as your first piece to prevent zippering and if you don't want to use the rest don't until the anchor. It's always better to have excess gear than not enough. This passive pro ideology sounds like an excuse for being cheap and not wanting to buy cams.

Hex isn't really a passive placement. They can be placed like a nut but you also place them active as well...

ViperScale wrote:Hex isn't really a passive placement. They can be placed like a nut but you also place them active as well...

Slick rock aside, cams are almost always going to be better than a cammed hex. I use my hexes more than the average joe trad climber and I almost never cam them. That being said, in some cases you can place it like a nut and also add some camming action to get a double whammy, but this almost never happens on lead because it takes a good amount of fiddling to do.

In my defense, I'd like to add that I started on this path because I'm a tightwad. It is more about cost savings to me than the ideology. Like, when I go up to Camalot #4 I am going to get a cam.

Kyle Drott wrote:In my defense, I'd like to add that I started on this path because I'm a tightwad. It is more about cost savings to me than the ideology. Like, when I go up to Camalot #4 I am going to get a cam.

Until then...

A SERENE anchor doesn't care whether you use cams, nuts, hexes, 2x4s, stovelegs, etc.

"S" means "solid". If your passive pieces are solid and you have the rest of SERENE and an upward directional, you're as good as you would be with cams. Even cam anchors usually are better off with an upward directional.

If you don't know how to place solid passive pro, you shouldn't be leading on it anyway.

This thread needs more HealyJE

eli poss wrote: Slick rock aside, cams are almost always going to be better than a cammed hex. I use my hexes more than the average joe trad climber and I almost never cam them. That being said, in some cases you can place it like a nut and also add some camming action to get a double whammy, but this almost never happens on lead because it takes a good amount of fiddling to do.

Yes but normally you build anchors at a nice ledge and you have all the time in the world to find a place to cam the hex.

Not that it matters I have built tons of anchors with nuts only. I personally prefer passive gear anytime I can find a placement over any cam.

The "idealistic" perspective, which is to say the voluntary restriction of means, lies at the very heart of climbing, which loses all meaning and content if absolutely anything goes. Climbers who don't get this actually don't get something essential about climbing itself.

But if your only reason for eschewing cams is that you are cheap, that's dumb. (Sorry.) You don't need anywhere near sixty nuts---you just wasted a lot money on duplication when you could have bought some cams. And although I would imagine you could find others willing to engage in the extra adventure of all-passive protection on "idealistic" grounds, expecting anyone to accompany you on outings that are more intricate and demanding because you're a cheapskate is expecting a whole hell of a lot.

As for going without cams, for fifteen years, I and everyone from my fading generation climbed multipitch routes up to 5.11 (with a touch of 5.12) with only passive protection, mostly because cams hadn't arrived, but for a while because some of us regarded them with suspicion.

Reading this thread, you could get the impression that climbing only with nuts is something radical and unsafe. Although it is true that you can get cam placements where nuts won't go, most areas (not including desert splitters) have enough variation to allow for substantial passive protection placements, but you will have to work harder than your cam-equipped friends and may have to master now-vanishing arts like stacking nuts and opposing nuts in horizontal cracks.

As nuts are more fiddly and so more tiring to place from trying stances, it makes sense even if you are carrying cams to use primarily nuts for your belay anchors if this is possible.

You asked about anchors. The standard multipitch anchor begins with two or three excellent downward-pull pieces (three for sure if you are new at the game). If the downward-pull pieces are in vertical cracks, are not key-holed and so able to withstand upward loads, and are subject to lifting by a hard catch, then you'll want an upward-directional piece to hold everything down. I think trusting a cam in a vertical crack to rotate 180 degrees from downward to upward orientation and not blow in the process is rolling the safety dice in a fairly serious way---once a cam is in motion its behavior is pretty unpredictable. So if you truly can't find any way to place an upward directional, then cams at least might resist upward loads, but counting on that as a substitute for real upward directionals is putting more faith in cams than they deserve.

Once you've got the pieces in, rigging them is no different if they are nuts or cams. If there is nothing like a ceiling immediately above that the belayer might hit, I prefer to rig the upward directional so that it holds down the anchor rather than directly holding down the belayer. This still allows for some belayer lift for a hard catch. To do this, use either the rope or a cordelette to rig the downward pull pieces, anchor to the powerpoint, and then run the rope from the power point down to the upward-directional and tighten the clove hitch so that the upward-directional is under tension and won't fall out.

Don't forget that you can use boulders and flakes and wedged chockstones for upward-directionals---it isn't always going to be a nut slotted upwards. Sometimes you wrap the rope around something, sling something, or thread something. And if you are having trouble, don't forget to look over the edge at the ground just below the belay stance, where further upward-direction possibilities may be lurking.

If you can't get an upward directional and you anchor possibilities are all in vertical cracks with no key-holing, then try to get an anchor as high as possible and sit rather than stand beneath it so that you will have to be pulled really high to pull up on your anchors. Also, a sideways-directional placement, though not ideal in theory, may be (a lot) better than nothing.

Forgive me if I missed it, but has anyone mentioned tricams? They're cheaper than cams and can often be placed to withstand both upward and downward pulls.