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Climber Creates The "Anti-Cam" - A Fall Protection Device
- liuhenry 16y agoAwesome concept, but from the pictures it looks to big to rack along with normal cams - are there really that many routes with flakes?
- blackguardx 16y agoFlakes are common on granite routes. You can usually put cams or nuts behind them, though. In this case, the flake is very loose and the gap between the flake and the rock behind it is very wide. If he did manage to place any large active pro behind it, it might pry the whole flake off in a fall. This would probably kill him, his belayer, and any people on the ground below. This is why it wasn't climbed by anyone until he invented this device, which won't pry the flake off the wall. One of the most famous granite flakes is the Texas Flake on the Nose route on El Capitan. The gap is so wide that you can't place any protection and must chimney up the 5.9 pitch with no pro.
- weaksauce 16y agoThey put a bolt about halfway up it some time ago, but it must be climbed free.
- crux_ 16y agoIt looks kind of route-specific / very, very niche: You need a quite skinny flake, attached either too far away or too loosely to the main wall to put normal cams or big bros in behind it, all without any other reasonable protection nearby. And if the flake is so loose that you're really worried about pulling it off the wall, running it out might actually be the safest thing to do. (That way, if you fall, you won't load the flake with your momentum. This gizmo will load it strictly downwards, which is the whole reason it's being used instead of normal cams -- which will pressure the flake out from the wall in a fall.)
- bmj 16y agoIt's slightly route specific, but when dealing with expando-flakes, particularly, this could be really useful. There are plenty of other pieces of protection out there that are feature/route specific (Big Bros and ship-anchor size cams come to mind). This will be useful to some climbers.
- Isamu 16y agoI love reading subculture jargon I know nothing about. Plus this is all about the problem-solving aspect of climbing, and about improvisation. Was it the Innovator's Dilemma that pointed out power users as a primary source of product innovation?
- joezydeco 16y agoThis article was probably the most dense lingo I've never understood. Very disorienting. Well done.
- weaksauce 16y agoclimbing is very fun... worth learning all the lingo.
- joezydeco 16y agoMy hands sweat just reading about climbing. Thanks but I'll pass.
- weaksauce 16y agoThat's funny, my hands sweat thinking about and watching climbing too! I don't like heights but love climbing. Once you learn to trust the gear it's not scary in a gym. Outdoors it's a different story because of all the unknowns but manageable based on the route you try. You should give indoors a shot.
- joezydeco 16y agoI probably will. I just think it's funny that even picturing it my head gets my palms sweaty.
- weaksauce 16y agoI think it's funny too. Watching videos make me sweat like crazy but actually climbing doesn't do it as much. It makes climbing tougher but you can chalk up and it helps a lot.
- twp 16y agoThis was built for a specific route in BC, Canada. The story of its development is told in the excellent web adventure sports series "The Season": http://www.theseasontv.com/ http://www.theseasontv.com/ You can see it in action in episode 21: http://www.theseasontv.com/?p=454 http://www.theseasontv.com/?p=454 The whole series of "The Season" is fantastic and well worth watching if you're into adventure sports. They follow a paddler, a mountain biker, a skier and a couple of climbers through a season. Recommended.
- etherealG 16y agothanks so much, that gives a great idea of how the whole thing happened. a great episode :)
- mbyrne 16y agoI don't get it. It's a C-clamp. Why not just build an escalator? Why not just tie yourself to a rope and have your Mommy pull you up? I remember seeing footage of some French guy climbing a rockface a thousand feet up swinging like a monkey, with no rope, no pitons, nothing. That is climbing.
- blackguardx 16y agoWhy the dismissive, acrid tone? This is a piece of free climbing protection. This, along with the rope is used just as a safety device in case the climber falls. If it was used for making progress, he would be aid climbing. If you read the article, you will see that there are still risks, however. His homemade gear could pull out. Or even if it catches him, the traversing nature of the route would cause him to take a huge swinging fall into a wall. These types of falls are very dangerous because you hit with your torso and your legs aren't there to cushion the blow to your internal organs.
- mbyrne 16y agoMy tone might have appeared dismissive because I was being dismissive. Is that not allowed? Are you the judge of how people should speak? Labeling and criticizing my "tone" is just an ad hominem attack, so you lose. Why not just answer my question, at what point do you stop? What is wrong with building an escalator, that would reduce risk too, if that is the goal, and according to you that is the goal of this device.
- blackguardx 16y agoI didn't make an ad hominem attack and posting a comment on the internet isn't a game that one can lose. Your comment demonstrates a lack of knowledge about rock climbing. Free soloing, which is climbing without protection, is far from the mainstream. You saw a video of it because it is an amazing display of mental toughness and physical fitness. Please don't use this as a stick by which to measure all other climbing endeavors.
- 16y ago
- jfager 16y agoIt seems like there are a few climbers on here, could one of you please explain how a climber goes about deciding that a flake is too dangerous to apply a horizontal force to but safe enough to apply a vertical force to?
- weaksauce 16y agoExpanding flakes (ones that will move when you pull outward on them) are not good placements for active gear. As the cam pushes outward on a fall the flake might expand and the the cam might pull out because it is past it's usable range. Hammering pitons in a flake like this will do it too. As you hammer a piton higher up the flake it loosens the lower piton because it expands the flake from above to the point that the lower piton might fall out.
- jfager 16y agoThanks. I do understand the mechanics, but the article seemed to imply that there are some flakes that people do use traditional cams to climb. I was more curious in how the line between safe and unsafe gets drawn than the theory behind why horizontal forces on flakes are dangerous. In other words: you pull on flake, and it moves - obviously, horizontal force is unsafe. But: how do you then decide a vertical force on the same flake is safe? Is it just feeling and experience, or are there actual rules people generally follow?
- aplusbi 16y agoWell from what I know this "anti-cam" device is the only rock protection that would not have a horizontal force component This guy is the first person to ever try it. All the other pro I can think of catches a fall by wedging into the crack, either by expanding or by taking advantage of a natural choke point.
- kscaldef 16y agoWell, you can't actually do an engineering analysis of a rock face, so you're never going to achieve that level of rigor. Placing protections and building anchors is a combination of experience and intuition; observation and analysis techniques; and a bit of actual physics around angles, direction of force, rope stretch, and force multipliers.