Practice rope ascending on a top rope

 
 
 

The image below is from the outstanding online big wall climbing course from VDiff climbing. It's a great course and quite a bargain; highly recommended!


Want to climb a big wall? Dialing in your rope ascending and cleaning techniques is key.

Here's a way to reduce risk when practicing these skills.

Set up a solid top rope anchor. On that same anchor point or something very close by, hang a single fixed rope.

Now, as you ascend the fixed rope (green) you're always backed up with a proper belay from your partner on the top rope (red). Now you can practice things like cleaning a traverse, leapfrogging past fixed gear, cam jugging, lowering out, maybe doing a mock lead, and other big wall shenanigans.

If you screw up anything on the green rope, no problem! You're backed up on red.

(This also applies to non-bigwall flavors of rope ascending, like prusiking for crevasse rescue practice.)

 
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Backup that single strand rappel anchor