Thread: NZ Hunter Adventures - the mightly Landsborough - Summit to Sea!

Originally Posted by GregD

On a trip like this where there are 5 of us but we are trying to minimise weight as much as possible due to all the camera and other gear we have to carry, instead of running the usual 2 man independent rope teams including seperate ropes and snow and rock anchors for each team which would mean a lot of extra weight over the whole party, we use some different techniques and run the whole 5 people as one team. We carry 1 x 60m 9mm single climbing rope (this means a single strand will hold your weight in a fall, as opposed to a half/double rope, which you need two strands to hold a fall) and a 60m super strong and light pull cord - 4mm Dyneema in this case. This is so we can do a full 60m abseil on the main rope, then pull the rope back down with the pull cord. You run the main rope thru the abseil anchor, and then tie and hook it back onto itself with a carabiner to take the weight, then attach your pull cord to the carabiner and run that out alongside the main rope as you descend. Then when you're at the bottom, you pull the 4mm which pulls on the carabiner, sliding it down the main rope, which pulls the main rope thru the anchor and retrieves the whole lot back down to you. Does this make sense? So the only thing you leave behind is a bit of 7mm cord tied round the rock in this case as an abseil anchor. You carry a bit of spare cord to leave behind as anchors for this reason (called tat in climbing jargon).

Greg,
Good technical info here thanks, do you run both the 9mm main rope and 4mm pull cord through your personal belay device starting below the caribiner ?

I'll be tuned in again next week !