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Rock Climbing Terms

rappelling

This article was originally posted at Wikipedia. To view the full article goto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappelling

In British English, abseiling (from the German abseilen, "to rope down") is the process of descending on a fixed rope.

It is also known as: rappelling (American English and elsewhere), abbing (British slang), jumping (Australian slang), rapping (American slang), roping down, roping, seiling (Australian slang), snapling, snappling or snappeling (Israeli slang).

Equipment A U.S. Marine rappels down a rock wall. A U.S. Marine rappels down a rock wall.
  • Helmets are worn to protect the head from bumps and falling rocks. A light source may be mounted on the helmet in order to keep the hands free.
  • Gloves protect hands from the rope and from hits with the wall. They are mainly used by recreational abseilers, industrial access practitioners, adventure racers and military as opposed to climbers or mountaineers. In fact, they can increase the risk of accident by becoming caught in the descender in certain situations.
  • Boots or other sturdy footwear with good grips.
  • Knee-pads (and sometimes elbow-pads) are popular in some applications for the protection of joints during crawls or hits.
  • Ropes used for descending are typically of Kernmantle rope construction, with a multi-strand core protected by an abrasion-resistant woven sheath. For most applications, low-stretch rope (typically ~2% stretch when under the load of a typical bodyweight) is used to reduce bouncing and to allow easier ascending of the rope.
  • A harness is used around the waist to secure the descender. It should be comfortable if you are planning on spending many hours hanging from it while descending.
  • A descender is a device or hitch which is designed to allow for rope to be paid out in a controlled fashion, under load, with a minimal amount of effort by the person controlling it. The speed with which the rope is allowed to pass is controlled by increasing or decreasing the amount of friction applied to the rope by the descender; the greater the friction, the slower the rope moves. These can be either mechanical or improvised.
    • o Some mechanical descenders include braking bars, the figure eight, the abseil rack, the "bobbin" (and its self-locking variant the "stop"), the gold tail, and the "sky genie" used by some window-washers and wildfire firefighters.
    • Some improvised descenders include the Munter hitch, a carabiner wrap, the basic crossed-carabiner brake and the piton bar brake (sometimes called the carabiner and piton). There is also the older, but more uncomfortable, method of wrapping the rope around one's body for friction, as in the Dulfersitz or Geneva methods popularly used by climbers in the 1960s.