How to Safely Set Up a Top Rope Climbing Anchor on Two Bolts While on Lead

I am not the greatest rock climber. I lack flexibility, which tends to push my hips away from the wall, putting a lot of pressure on my finger strength. My striving to improve has, therefore, been a lot about improving both of those characteristics, to both mitigate the weakness of poor flexibility and to leverage the balancing strength of being able to hold on to things.

I am also not the greatest alpinist. Asthma and my surgically reconstructed (three times) right knee - along with the arthritis in it - conspire to place some limitation on my physical ability to move fast over big terrain. I work out somewhat manically to help on these fronts.

But what I am good at is systems and transitioning from one system to another. I can make up time by being efficient in my systems, from the smallest things - like knowing what order to put things in my pack so that the stuff I change out most is always on the top - to the most complex things, like crevasse rescue with a single rope.

Today’s video is about a system transition: going from climbing up on lead to being lowered down from the anchor. And in this particular video, we leave a top rope anchor in place at the top; so, we are building the lowering system from scratch while hanging on the side of a cliff. On the plus side, hundreds of thousands of rock climbers of all stripes and ability levels do this many, many times every day. On the downside, the transition from an upward system to a downward system is singularly dangerous… particularly when we are talking about sport climbing.

Unlike traditional climbing, the sport climbing bolts we place our draws on are usually bomber and very unlikely to fail. So, while traditional climbing suffers from the frequency of blown-out gear during climber falls, sport climbing very, very rarely does. Yes, catastrophic injuries can come from falls while climbing sport routes, but those are usually due to massive runouts between overly spaced bolts coupled with terrain traps like ledges and the like. What the most common catastrophic accident is for sport climbers is from the process of moving downward.

It used to be that rappelling off of the ends of the rope was the biggest issue. It may still be. But in response, modern sport climbing has moved towards an ethic of lowering down rather than rappelling. This means the rope never leaves the belayer, making it impossible to come off of the ends of the rope (as long as your knots stay tied at both ends).

So, what is left are anchor failures - which is exceedingly rare, and lowering accidents. Certainly, people can be lowered down too fast; the rope could slip through the belayers hands and the like. But what is far more likely is an error made at the top of the route, by the climber, when setting up their new lowering system.

Why is that?

Well, the climber is on their own. At the bottom of routes, we have someone there to cross-check our setups. Up top, the climber needs to get it right without anyone there to double check things. And as we can see from watching the video, there are quite a few steps involved in climbing a route, setting up a bomber anchor that can take climbers running laps on it all day, and then switching the climber’s load from the lead quickdraw to this new top rope anchor. (There are less steps involved in transitions from climbing to directly lowering). This needs to be done correctly, every time.

So, while many climbers will know this process like the back of their hand, new climbers need to become just as proficient. That’s why this video is here. It is one thing to climb well. It’s another thing to get down safely.