Tag Archives: climbing anchors

What the heck is that little piece of pig iron sticking out of the rock? Topher Dabrowski, who submitted these photos, says that he’d heard that there are some very “old bolts” on the upper pitches of The Fine Line, in Idaho’s Sawtooth Range. This is what he encountered. Want a better shot? Hey, no problem. Look at this

Where exactly does one procure a cable-swagged horseshoe nail? That’s what this is, isn’t it? A horseshoe nail, with a hole drilled into it, with a cable added? No? Then you tell me what it is. It’s certainly not your standard piton, and despite what Topher was told, it’s definitely not a bolt! My guess is that it’s probably homemade and quite old. I don’t think I’d like to fall on it.

And how about that pitch 7, eh? With some scary angle aluminum riveted to the rock, sticking out half an inch to invite your rope to a good old fashioned sheath stripping.

Scary rivet thingy want’s to slice your rope.

How about a close up, so you can re-live that scary rock climbing lead moment if you like.

Scary Rivet Close Up

That also looks very, very old. Did Fred Beckey place this? Greg or Jeff Lowe? I think it’s served its time.

And hey, just for good measure since Topher was in the Sawtooths, how about some scary Leeper hangers from The Elephant’s Perch? We last encountered some of these at Indian Creek in Moab, Utah. Remember? Those hangers were recalled because they tend to break, remember?

Scary Leeper Hangers.

Be careful rock climbing out there kids, and support your local rebolting projects.

Gosh, how the heck do you tie a bight of rope to a bolt hanger after you already tied it to the other bolt hanger with a funky ass knot? This is the question I envision the crafter of the Jive-Ass Rappel set up above having in the midst of crafting this F-ed up anchor. Now granted, I don’t know if the, um…the…what would you even call that? ‘Stopper knot’? The thing on the left I mean. The bight of rope affixed to a bolt hanger with an overhand knot (the idea apparently being that the big fat knot will keep the rope from pulling back through the hole in the bolt hanger). Let’s go with stopper knot. Anyway, I don’t know if the decision to create the stopper knot was due to fixing the other end of the rope to the other bolt hanger first. That’s just my spectulation. Call it imaginary forensics if you like. I frankly have no idea why anyone would do this.

This Jive-Ass rappel set up (abseil set up for the Brits and Aussies among us) was submitted by Drew Smith, who happened upon it at Twin Craigs in the Lake Tahoe region of California. And since a lot of you have expressed concern that we all actually do something to remedy Jive-Ass situations rather than just take photographs of them, I want it noted for the record that, yes, Drew removed this shit so no one would get hurt in the future.

Now can we go back for a moment and evaluate this thing? The knot on the right hand bolt anchor: what the heck is that? I thought maybe a bowline at first, but now I’m not so sure. I can’t for the life of me figure out what that is.

And the anchor powerpoint. What the hell is that knot? I thought an overhand on a bight, but it looks like that quick link is attached to only one loop. Where’s the second loop?

And finally, can I say it again? Why the hell would you affix a rope to a bolt hanger with a stopper knot? Scary.

How many Jive-Ass boxes can you tick on these anchors? That’s the question Samuel Feuerborn, who sent me these photos, asks us to ponder. There’s a lot going on in the image below, so take a moment to soak it in. We’ll wait. Then we can dive in with Sam’s assessment, and my own usual embellishments.

Jive-Ass Bolt Anchor on Ninja (5.11+), on the Reservoir Wall at Indian Creek, Moab, Utah.

This anchor was on Ninja at Resevoir Wall in Indian Creek in Moab, Utah. According to Sam, it includes: an American Death Triangle, retired leeper hangers, a hardware store wedge bolt, a star dryvin bolt, a modern 3/8″ 5 piece that’s hanging a 1/2 inch out of the freakin’ wall (!), lots and lots of faded tat, and four extremely heavily worn ‘leaver biners’.

Wow! It’s sort of breathtaking to see so much jive-assery in one set up! I’m really impressed! I get the sense that this one is a community effort, developed and nurtured over time. I encourage you all to play a rock climber’s version of Where’s Waldo and see if you can find all of the treats Sam has identified. I can certainly see the deeply worn notch in one of those leaver biners. And that bit of 6mm or 7mm purple cord is tied to one set of bolts in a classic American Death Triangle. I think that shiny bolt on the far left is the Star dryvin. Finally, Sam doesn’t mention this, look at how that yellow webbing sliding-x dealio on the right side bolts is just threaded through the hangers.

Ah, but it get’s better. Sam has close ups!

Modern 3/8 inch 5 piece bolt pulled a half inch out of the wall.

Check it out! There’s a bolt pulled a half inch out of the crumbly-ass sandstone! That inspires all kinds of confidence, eh? Let’s hear it for redundancy (Whew!).

Here are the Leeper Hangers. For those of you not in the know, Ed Leeper himself recalled these hangers back in 2004 due to a serious flaw he was unaware of when he first designed and manufacured them. Apparently they are succeptible to “stress-corrosion cracking”, which may not be so apparent at first, but eventually looks like this:

Cracked Leeper Hanger

In this scenario, the top half remains bolted to the wall, and the bottom half is clipped to your quick draw, which is also clipped to your rope, which is coiled willy-nilly on top of your broken body at the bottom of the pitch. Ouch!

Trouble is something like 95,000 of these things were made between 1962 and 1984, and maybe 20,000 to 40,000 were still installed as of 2004, according to Ed Leeper’s estimation. So to try to get the word out to the climbing community to search and replace these things, Ed took out a full page ad in Rock and Ice magazine that looked sort of like this. Good on Ed for doing what he can to get these things replaced. You can do your part by keeping an eye out and helping with the search and destroy (and replace). Apparently you can start at Indian Creek in Moab!

Oh yeah, this recall was discussed in detail back in 2004 in the Rockclimbing.com forums, which still exist for your perusal.

Some climbing buddies pointed out to me today that Climbing Magazine posted a Ridiculous Anchors Edition of their Unbelayvable series (which recounts harrowing tales of reader-submitted climbing stupidity). And this installment does indeed deliver some high quality climbing anchor Jive-Assery, the most noteworthy being this one:

The Climbing magazine piece quotes a guy named John Gregory in its photo caption (it would have been decent of them to at least post a link to his fine blog) [UPDATE: they did add a link to John’s site in the Climbing magazine piece–nice work!], so I looked him up to discover that John is almost like a long lost brother, a comrade in arms as it were. John manages an awesome blog–not unlike Jive-Ass Anchors–called Dumb Anchors. Most of his examples appear to be from Carderock, Maryland, USA. And indeed the photo above is from his blog. In fact, John has also posted a photo of this “dumb anchor” from another angle, which illustrates the full cluster-fuckery of this horrible anchor even more explicitly. There are some real gems in John’s blog. You should check it out.

At any rate, seeing this sort of inspired me to offer a shout out to everyone out there fighting the good fight by documenting and dissecting all of the Jive-Ass anchors we encounter out there in the world. And for those of you who see and photograph them, I’d also like to encourage you to not only witness but also to intervene. If you see something particularly dangerous and you can fix it, or educate the builder of said Jive-Ass anchor (with a bit of tact and diplomacy of course), please do so. Here are a few of the more prominant lousy anchor resources online:

And finally, while not devoted exclusively to horrifying climbing anchors, the /r/climbing sub-Reddit on Reddit often has instances of pure Jive-Ass gold. People send me stuff form here all the time: http://www.reddit.com/r/climbing

Alex Fox found this little gem when climbing in The Gunks a few weeks ago. “Allergic to Metal” is his name, due to the fact that, well, there is nary a carabiner or nut or cam other piece of metal anywhere to be seen. I’ve certainly seen worse anchors, but this is pretty Jive-Ass just the same.

Apparently the yellow cord going off-camera is tied to a tree with some exotic knot Alex couldn’t identify. “[I]t was backed up with a double overhand,” he added, “so was likely fairly secure.” All fine and well I suppose. But the stuff in the shot? Yeah. That’s Jive-Ass gold! Here are the issues Alex was able to enumerate himself:

1) “The webbing is tied around a completely detached boulder.” In other words, a classic Wiley Coyote set up. It’s a pretty big rock, mind you. But it’s not really that big!

2) There is some “hot nylon-on-nylon action” (my words being quoted by the way!) where cord meets webbing in a girth-hitch. Why, oh why not just connect the pieces of cord with a carabiner? We know what can happen when you connect soft goods together with a girth hitch. This happens (note the paragraph titled “Cyclic”).

3) Then there is a dyneema sling, which has a melting point of about 130 to 136 °C (266 to 277 °F), rather precariously girth hitched around another rock.

4) Finally, and this is the clincher, Alex notes that both the nylon and dyneema webbing have a few random overhand knots tied in them, which, as Alex eloquently puts it, “didn’t appear to serve any purpose aside from weakening its overall strength.”