How to Back-up Belay for Climbing Safety
Hi, my name is Jason Montecalvo with Sport Rock Climbing Centers and today we’re learning how to climb safely in an Indoor Climbing gym. Remember, climbing is inherently a dangerous activity and you want to seek professional help by certified instructors prior to engaging in this activity. Now I like to discuss using a back-up Belayer when we start to Belay, it’s always a good idea as a beginner to have 3 people in this system; a Climber, a Belayer, and a back-up Belayer in order to ensure our safety when we’re first learning how to Belay. The idea of a back-up Belayer is to be the second break in case I make a mistake as the main Belayer with my break hand, if my break hand comes off and my climber would take a fall, my back-up Belayer is going to do the breaking for me. Now to properly get a stance in back-up Belaying, what we need is to have this person be down on one or two knees with the break end of the rope in both hands. At that point, I’m going to Belay the way that I have been taught. And what my back-up Belayer is going to do is feed the break out as I am feeding it as well, maintaining a little bit of slack in my break line here so I can belay myself safely. If I were to make a mistake at any point and take a break hand off and my climber were to fall, the first thing that my back-up Belayer wants to do is take those 2 hands that are on the rope and bring them directly to the floor if they are not already there, that is going to create an extremely big bend, a break bend on our Belay device and catch our climber for us. Something our back-up Belayer is going to want to do when we are lowering the climber is feed the rope back the opposite direction, again, maintaining a little bit of slack here in the break line so I can lower my climber on my own, but again, if I have a problem and I make a mistake, my back-up Belayer will again have those 2 hands that never leave the rope and go directly down to the floor again, making once again, a very big emergency break. That can ensure our safety as well the climber, Belayer and back-up Belayer utilizing the system properly. Next we’d like to see this full system in action.