If you cannot tell the difference between a safe fall and a dangerous one, then I don’t know what to say. (Yes, I do. If you weren’t able to tell the difference, you would not still be here.)

You don't alway control your fall. You don't alway know how or were you going to stop or land.

Climbing sometimes is a "leap of faith". I trust that bolt, nut, friend, sling, quickdraw, belayer or anchor to hold my fall. Doesn't alway happen.

I have been on and done (r and x rated) routes that if you fall you could hurt yourself or even die. In that situation the gear becomes secondary and your ability and experience comes first.

I'll stick with my views and you to yours.

Curt,

Quick question. Since everything but what we see in the photos is conjecture, let me ask this: is there any situation where this anchor would not be adequate? For instance, if I told you the route below the anchor wandered 20' left and right of the anchor. Or if a group of schoolchildren would be toproping on it all day. Or perhaps if I told everyone I knew that Curt Shannon tied quadruple fisherman's knots.

Let me ask you a slighty different question. If you were building the TR anchor for that spot, how would you do it?

FWIW I wouldn't setup that anchor. I might climb on it,depending on a lot of factors. Wouldn't put my kids on it.

Murf

I said earlier that I was done with this thread. However, since you are addressing your question specifically to me, I will answer.

I think absolutes are hard to come by. So, when you ask me if I would climb on that anchor or let my child climb on that anchor, I can only say that the answer is "yes" based on what I can determine from the pictures that we have.

Curt

DOing something poorly for a long time and getting away with it does not make it a good practice.

Odds are they put an overhand loop on the rope/biner end of the webbing (not shown but the orange sling has one for the same reason) so even if one strand was cut through (exceedingly unlikely, even without the padding, given the nature of 1" tubular), the other would still hold a TR fall.

So... I was looking up "pissing match" in an online dictionary and it didn't offer a definition, but rather a link to this thread. And that's how I found myself here, again.


The thing of interest is did find was the above. The sling (farily certain it's not webbing) is girth hitched to the cordellet. Even if there was a knot near the at the rope end, would the girth hitch be a sufficient knot if one strand of the sling is cut? And that is a real question. Assuming the maximum TR force is something near a 1000 lbs.

Any thoughts?

The anchor that prompeted this discussion presents a confounding situation--it did hold, and therefore did its job, so any criticism is strictly theoretical, not real. But any theory suggesting a single strand TR set up is one that sometime, somewhere, might bring the curtain down on someone.

When I wrote out those "rules" in the two anchor books, the idea was to establish a general and far-reaching protocol that would maximize the likelihood of folks building anchors that would not fail. Over a very short time the rules got codified into a sort of gospel ? not strictly my own, since I drew upon many sources, and after standardizing the terms, wove the lot into one overall strategy. Perhaps the result saved a few lives.

Anyway, the downside of this "gospel" is two fold: first, folks came to believe that if the anchor met the SRENE (solid, redundant, equalized, and no extension) criteria, said anchor was automatically fail safe; and second, any anchor that did not meet the criteria was, without exception, a liability, as was the climber who placed same. Reality does not support either notion.

....


JL

Soles was seeing what he wanted to see.
There is no way a girth hitch would hold even body weight if the sling was cut.
It is not redundant.

Have you actually tried this? I'm not saying that it would hold 1000lbs, and I certainly don't set things up like this, but it will certainly hold body weight. Perhaps not in a tape-cord connection, but in tape-tape, definitely.

Cheers,
Karl P