More than one rappel on single pitch route?

Yes and no greg. If you have a crag with 100 routes that can all be done with a 60m and 1 route that needs a 70m. That 1 route is probably going to get climbed alot less (possibly end up with someone getting injuries who is new and doesn't realize you need a 70m). Now if you have a new crag with 25 routes that need 60m and as you devlopment it now you have like 30 routes that need 70m and 70 routes that need a 60m there is a good chance people would use a 70m there. These days you are right and alot of us do have 70m so it is very area dependent. I own a 70m but if I look at a guide book and only see 1-2 routes that require a 70m they would have to be amazing classic routes for me to both bringing the extra weight of a 70m for a single pitch crag.

I speak somewhat from experience on this I climbed a 70m trad route at one of our crags with a 60m rope and we didn't realize it until we were lowering that we needed a 70m to lower. My friend ended up climbing up the first 15ft free solo while belaying me down so I could touch the ground. He was on a good ledge at that point and tied in so I could belay him up to clean the route. Once he was at the anchor because of the way it traversed at the end he was able to rappel down to the last 5 ft of the route. Now given we know what we are doing and watch for stuff like this and he made sure I didn't get hurt even though we made the mistake. Would I have died if he had let the rope run through at the end? Probably not but the way the end of the route was a small rock ledge sticking out 2 ft for the last 4ft of the route it could have killed me if I fell 10-15ft and hit it wrong.

Yes and no.  Actually just no.  If carrying 10 more meters of rope to a crag so you can have options is an issue, I really don't know what to say.   

Your statement makes it sound like all routes at a crag get put up the same day by some committee or route planner. 

No but why would out of a crag of 50-100 routes would you want to put a random spike that could get someone hurt? Now if there are tons of other high routes at this crag where anyone going there would know that they may need a bigger rope than sure go ahead throw it up you have to start somewhere.

Highly competent and capable people make simple mistakes while climbing. Everyone is susceptible to it.

https://gripped.com/news/alex-honnolds-summer-injuries-result-of-rope-climbing-accident/

http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201213850/Fall-on-Rock-Incomplete-Tie-In-Knot

http://www.rockandice.com/climbing-news/john-long-accident-details-and-update

Anomalies and abnormal situations such as a crag with 25 30-meter routes and one 35-meter route increase the likelihood of these types of accidents. A second anchor is like 20 bucks. If there end up being a lot of other 35-meter routes I doubt that anyone will care that the first one had an extra anchor on it.

A 70-meter rope is 10 meters longer than a 60-meter rope. If you bolt the route for a 70-meter rope to get a person back down to the ground and someone lowers off of the end of their 60-meter rope then they will have a 30 foot fall onto their tailbone.

Just because a 60m rope isn't long enough doesn't mean you need the entire 70m rope to get down... think about that for a minute.

A crag I know uses a gold bolt hangers for the first bolt on mixed pro routes. It's well-known to everyone who goes there that if you see a gold bolt you need to bring a rack. You could establish the same sort of precedent at your crag - a gold (or blue, or red, or...) bolt indicates that you need a 70m rope. Sounds like you're not going to have any mixed pro routes, anyway!

FWIW I've seen a very experienced climber lowered off the end after finishing what we all thought was a 30m route. Super scary moment for our whole group. Glad you're trying to think this through and do it right to help prevent accidents.

Yeah, and while you’re at it please install some hand rails on the approach, extra anchors on all the 30m routes so I can climb them safely with my 50m rope, and maybe some colored tape to mark the holds. It doesn't matter how "safe" a crag has been engineered, if you're careless enough you can still get hurt. Better to instead remain vigilant and enjoy an activity that is full of diversity of experience and varying risks. That's just me. I suppose no amount of arguing will change the mindset of people who think safety and convenience are the paramount values in rock climbing. Good luck out there and don’t forget to check your knot. And to the OP: I'm sure if you weigh these responses and think it through you'll come to a good decision. And if you make a mistake - no big deal! Afterall, as you said yourself it's a chossy cliff in the middle of Missouri.

Thanks for the suggestions, y'all! I'll talk this over with the guy I'm developing this crag with and we'll probably just end up placing the anchor at 30m. Contrary to what some of you here said, our club does take safety seriously, and I definitely wouldn't want someone to get injured on a route I put up just because I wanted 5 extra meters of climbing.

ViperScale wrote:

...My friend ended up climbing up the first 15ft free solo while belaying me down so I could touch the ground....

I'm trying to imagine a situation and sequence of actions where this sentence would make sense and I can't. If the belayer locks off the belay device and starts climbing to be able to keep lowering the climber, he's not free soloing by any stretch.

I like the suggestion of adding an intermediate anchor somewhere on the route, preferably at a stance or some spot where the difficulty or quality or other characteristic changes, not at some arbitrary length for safety which may be right at a crux, no natural stance, etc. You may end up with a 20-meter first pitch, and 15-meter extension that people can climb if they are so inclined. P1 may go at one grade, and P2 may go at another grade. The whole thing could be climbed in one pitch with a 60m rope, and with an intermediate anchor the climber can lower/rap from the top, stop at the first anchor then lower or rap again.

Yes this adds more potential for mistakes if someone is not paying attention, but people get hurt all the time on pitches shorter than 30 meters, too. You can't design all danger out of a route, and if you start establishing routes for a specific length rather than the aesthetics or quality of the line, then you're just gym climbing.

TLDR: Bolt the length of the route, not the length of your rope, add intermediate anchors if necessary. If done well, anyone who hurts themselves on your route is not your fault.

Greg D. The math is wrong.  But whatever.  Maybe that's supports the idea we need to dumb things down.

Could you show me how the math is wrong? If the anchors are 35 meters high then a 60 meter rope will run 35 meters up to them from the belayer and then down 25 meters to the climber when the end of the rope hits the belay device. Leaving the climber 10 meters above the ground.  There is some wiggle room here: the rope will stretch a couple of meters, the belay device is about a meter off of the ground, a meter is actually 3.28 feet not 3, etc. But, 30 feet is a pretty good starting point for how far a person will fall if being lowered.

Perhaps you were thinking of someone rappelling. In that case, the fall would only be around 15 feet. It seems much more likely to me that the first climber on the route will be lowered.

Michael Swanson wrote:

I like the suggestion of adding an intermediate anchor somewhere on the route, preferably at a stance or some spot where the difficulty or quality or other characteristic changes, not at some arbitrary length for safety which may be right at a crux, no natural stance, etc. You may end up with a 20-meter first pitch, and 15-meter extension that people can climb if they are so inclined. P1 may go at one grade, and P2 may go at another grade. The whole thing could be climbed in one pitch with a 60m rope, and with an intermediate anchor the climber can lower/rap from the top, stop at the first anchor then lower or rap again.

Yes this adds more potential for mistakes if someone is not paying attention, but people get hurt all the time on pitches shorter than 30 meters, too. You can't design all danger out of a route, and if you start establishing routes for a specific length rather than the aesthetics or quality of the line, then you're just gym climbing.

TLDR: Bolt the length of the route, not the length of your rope, add intermediate anchors if necessary. If done well, anyone who hurts themselves on your route is not your fault.

And what Josh Janes said.......     your climb should go all the way to "END" and not some static, preset distance. If longer than 30m ..... so what. 

"Real Climbers" can figure it out for themselves, boulders .... well not so much.    

Ryan Van Dyke wrote:

I mean yeah... But for one route? When I just bought a 60m rope? Plus the lowering/rappelling question is still valid, even if I buy a 70m rope. Every single other climb at this crag is 60m, so what's someone with a 60m rope supposed to do when they find out their rope is too short?

If you're just wanting to see if the route goes before bolting it you could always build an anchor off a tree, fix your line and test the route using top rope solo techniques to see where/if you would want to bolt it.  Then you could just walk off; but you should probably look at investing in a longer rope as many others have said or if your dead set on not buying a new rope use the knot or biner block method to add enough length to your rope to get back down. 

As many folks have said, a second anchor would be appropriate if you take the line to 35 m.  An added thought - if this route really happens, name it "Seventy Meter Rope Required". Yes, I am serious, given that all the other routes are 60-capable.

Josh Janes wrote:

I suppose no amount of arguing will change the mindset of people who think safety and convenience are the paramount values in rock climbing.

Will a single off-colored bolt really harm your climbing experience that much? I'm sick of hearing about lower-off and rap accidents that are easily avoided, and this holier-than-thou attitude perpetuates the problem. Yeah it would be great if all the new gym rat gumbies had your good judgment and years of experience, but the fact that they don't is no license to recklessly put them in harms way. 

Here's part of the reason I care: I believe that high profile injuries and deaths in climbing will someday soon be used by regulators to justify actions that really, truly harm our freedom to climb. If we don't take steps to help keep each other safe from the basic accidents that are easily avoided, someone else will step in and do it for us in a heavy handed way. And if you think folks like Zinke & Co. aren't looking hard for any excuse to shut down the recreational use of public lands and hand them over to commercial interests, then you haven't been paying attention.

Emmett Lyman wrote:

Will a single off-colored bolt really harm your climbing experience that much? I'm sick of hearing about lower-off and rap accidents that are easily avoided, and this holier-than-thou attitude perpetuates the problem. Yeah it would be great if all the new gym rat gumbies had your good judgment and years of experience, but the fact that they don't is no license to recklessly put them in harms way. 

Except that off-colored bolt maybe doesn't help overall. Maybe it gets people that learn at that crag to expect that is the norm and now they are more likely to lower off the end of their rope at another crag that doesn't change the hanger colors? Shielding folks from considering / handling these situations and relying on somebody else to inform them may not be helpful in the bigger picture.

ViperScale wrote:

... and someone dying because they didn't know it needed a 70m rope (highly unlikely since you are talking about only falling 10-15ft at most if you were lowering with a 60m and the rope went through the belay device)

Please don't perpetuate this dangerous myth. It's easy to die from a 10'-15' fall - it all depends on the landing and what you hit. Even if you don't die, you can still get really messed up. I happen to know someone who got injured in a lowering accident - no knot in the end of the 60m rope but the lower required more; about 15' more. Multiple operations and two years of rehab and he still does not have full mobility in one knee and ankle and he is not pain-free.

MojoMonkey wrote:

Except that off-colored bolt maybe doesn't help overall. Maybe it gets people that learn at that crag to expect that is the norm and now they are more likely to lower off the end of their rope at another crag that doesn't change the hanger colors? Shielding folks from considering / handling these situations and relying on somebody else to inform them may not be helpful in the bigger picture

I get it, I really do. It drives me crazy to see folks out climbing without the skills they really need. And I get that providing crutches like the one I suggested doesn't give them any additional incentive to get those skills. But if a gym rat kid dies at the OP's crag and his mom flies off the handle and forms "Mothers Against Rock Climbing" to lobby the MO legislature to restrict climbing access, then we all lose. And in this particular case, where all the other climbs are done with a 60m and that's the established norm for the crag, why not try to do something to prevent tragedy?

The route should dictate where the anchor(s) should go, not the climbers ability (or inability) to get belayed or repel safely. This isn't the gym. You should know how to get down, even if you realize that you are lowering or rapping from a route that is inconvenient for your rope length. If someone gets dropped or raps off of the end of a rope, it's not the route's fault. Typically there is a description of a route somewhere to check out the rating and length and if you need gear.

Emmett Lyman wrote:

I get it, I really do. It drives me crazy to see folks out climbing without the skills they really need. And I get that providing crutches like the one I suggested doesn't give them any additional incentive to get those skills. But if a gym rat kid dies at the OP's crag and his mom flies off the handle and forms "Mothers Against Rock Climbing" to lobby the MO legislature to restrict climbing access, then we all lose. And in this particular case, where all the other climbs are done with a 60m and that's the established norm for the crag, why not try to do something to prevent tragedy?

Emmett may be making an extreme example here - he is an excitable boy - but the first hanger being gold at Farley is pretty well understood and communicated there.  I think its all well and good to suggest that in a predominately trad enviroment (Gunks, Yosemite, etc.) that it is reasonable to expect people to know how to cope with getting down regardless of rope length and anchor spacing.  But in a sport situation where you are already relying on others to have prepared the route for you it's reasonable that there be some additional clues at the base as to what will be involved.  Maybe we can take a clue from the Euros (we certainly could in a lot of more important areas then climbing - but lets not digress...) and mark name, grade and length at the base - is that really going to ruin things for you purists at an area that is already grid bolted and ticked?

I do agree that trying to accomodate a certain rope length as the standard is futile.  My first routes were done on 120 feet of Goldline - going to 150 feet was revolutionary - and heavy.