The second in Olly's three part series, this article looks at two of the most fundamental skills when it comes to big wall climbing: Leading & Following.

If you missed the first installment in the series, you can read it via the link below:

Basics of Leading

Setup

The standard setup for my aid system is to have my ladders on snapgates and lanyards with screwgates. I clip the gear with the snapgate (the lead carabiner), and clip my lanyards' screwgates into the lead carabiner.

Progressing

Progressing on aid is obviously very different to free climbing. When practicing, ideally start with a bolt ladder to simplify the situation. This can be done on a sport route or at the gym (ask permission first). Once you have the movement sorted, you just need to combine it with placing gear to be able to lead an aid pitch. The standard way of moving is as follows:

1. Clip the lead carabiner to the next bolt.
2. Start to climb up the ladder.
3. As you do, tighten your lanyard so you can go hands free.
4. Reach down to clip a quickdraw to the previous bolt THEN unclip the previous lead carabiner. If you do this the other way around then there will be a time when you're not clipped to the previous piece.
5. Slacken the lanyard you've just removed.
6. Climb up your ladder until you can reach the next bolt.
7. Repeat.

This becomes much easier with an Alfifi, as you can simply bump it from piece to piece instead of step 3, which removes step 5 as you never have to adjust your lanyards. 

Top Stepping

Top stepping is when you climb your ladders until you are standing in their highest step. It's important for reaching spaced placements or reaching past bad placements. It's easier on slabs, but it's also possible on vertical and even slightly overhanging terrain by using your Alfifi to hold yourself in balance. 

You climb up the steps of your ladder, shortening your Alfifi as you go until it starts to slide up the back of the lead carabiner as your hips move above the piece. You can continue to walk your feet up the steps, loosening your Alfifi to allow movement up, but not so much that you lose tension. It's possible to use a lanyard to do this instead but because it can't be released under tension it's more awkward. 

It's important to avoid pulling outwards from the wall as you transition from being below to above the gear. Whilst this might fly with bolts, it won't work so well with delicate hooks and pins as it might cause them to rip. 

Aid-to-Free and Free-to-Aid Transitions

Another important skill is transitioning from aid climbing to free climbing and vice versa. Going from free to aid is fairly straightforward (start cruxing out, desperately place gear, then clip your ladders to it). 

The reverse is only slightly more involved. You just clip the rope to the last piece of gear, unclip your ladder, and start climbing. It can be more difficult psychologically though, which often results in people aiding 5.8 hand cracks that they'd normally free without thought. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to seamlessly transition between the two, which is why practice is so important!

Pendulums

Pendulums are some of the most fun parts of aid climbing. They're also fairly self-explanatory:

1. Get to just below the pendulum point and clip a quickdraw to it and the lead line into the quickdraw.
2. Get your belayer to take you tight and lower you down to about level with where you want to swing to.
3. It's a good idea to pre-rack the gear you'll need to place at the peak of your swing (often a hook or a cam).
4. Start running backwards and forwards along the wall to generate momentum.
5. Generate enough to reach the placement and place the gear, sagging back onto your lanyard.
6. Tell your belayer to give you slack as you lower onto the gear.

After a pendulum, rope management can be tricky. If you start clipping gear immediately you'll create a big Z in the rope and get terrible drag. In most scenarios it's best to not leave any gear for protection until you are roughly level with the pendulum point. 

If this isn't an option, you can either settle with horrendous rope drag, or you can carry a spare lead rope and start clipping it after the pendulum. The other option is to rope solo the pitch and then clip the gear immediately as there's no rope drag. 

Traverses

If you don't lead it well, there's potential to give your follower a hard time cleaning a traverse. The important thing to remember is that you either need to leave every piece of gear so that the follower can clean the previous whilst hanging from the next, or you can back clean from a lower out point - a fixed piece of gear - until you start stitching it up again..

If you space out cams every 5 metres on an aid pitch, then your second will be faced with the choices of re-aiding it (if they're lucky enough to have the gear required on them) or leaving something behind and lowering out off it, neither of which are ideal.

Taglines

There's a lot of heavy gear needed for aid climbing. In order to not have everything you might need on you at once, and to avoid having the weight of the thick haul line on you, you can use a tagline.

A tagline is a length of skinnier cord, one end of which is carried by the leader and the other is clipped to the top of the haul line. It can be used to pass gear between climber and belayer. It's a bad idea to ever disconnect the bottom end of the haul line from the belayer, so you can only tag gear from the sum of the lengths of the tagline and haul line divided by two. 

A 60m tagline is nice as you can tag gear for the entirety of the pitch. You can also tag everything you need to build a belay and to haul with from the top of the pitch as you pull the top of the haul line up.

Bounce Testing

This is the secret for making harder aid less scary.

The premise is that you load each piece of gear with a greater force than you'll generate whilst climbing it. You do this from below the safety of the previous piece, which you've also tested. The hope is that if you test well then you should never fall. 

The best way of bounce testing gear is to use a lanyard. You start by statically hanging from your lanyard, then you bounce your weight on it harder and harder until you get to the desired force. The idea is that if it fails you want to minimise the shock on your lower gear to prevent it from ripping too.

You should be prepared for the piece you are testing to fail. Don't look at it as you test as it can hit you in the face. Also make sure that you'd sag into a stable position on the lower piece if the top comes out.

The other way to bounce test is with your ladders. You clip a ladder to the test piece and stamp your bodyweight down on it. This has the drawback of being less controllable if the top piece fails, increasing the chance of the lower piece also failing. This method is often easier to do on traverses and is quicker as you don't have to adjust your lanyards.

There's some nuance to how hard you want to test each piece. You don't want to make a habit of bouncing your delicate gear hard. Repeatedly putting the force of a fall onto it will quickly knacker it. Similarly, bouncing too hard on gear with low breaking stresses (such as microcams, RPs, copperheads and hooks) can cause the gear itself to break. In general, you shouldn't bounce any fixed gear hard that you aren't prepared to replace.

At the Belay

Once you get to the belay after finishing your pitch, you need to fix the lead line so the follower can clean and put the haul line through a PCP so the bags can be lowered out. The follower can't do anything until you've done this, so you shouldn't waste time after finishing the pitch before getting this done. 

When fixing a rope to be ascended, it's best practice to double fix, i.e. fix it to the belay twice for redundancy. Good communication is vital. It's obviously disastrous to try to ascend a rope that isn't fixed, or to lower bags out that are on the climber, not the PCP. Come up with a good way of communicating in case you can't hear each other, or carry radios.

UK Aid Routes

There are some stray relics of the old aid climbing days dotted around the UK which are good to practice leading on. Dovedale and Thor's Cave are very good wet weather options for the Peak District.

You can also practice clean aid climbing on unpopular routes at quiet times. My first aid lead on gear was Minus Ten (HVS 5a) at Stoney Middleton at 1am after a six hour minibus journey from London and a bottle of port down. 

The only standout route I've come across for practicing harder aid is The Very Old and the Very New (?) in the Llanberis Slate Quarries. It's pretty easy to get a top rope on it, and it's fantastic practice for placing cam hooks and beaks.

Following

Unlike with free climbing, it's standard practice to jumar a pitch to follow it rather than re-climbing it. Some people assume this makes it quick and easy to follow aid pitches and it can be, with practice. Having said that, the main reason for people bailing on the South Face of Washington Column (the most beginner big wall) is failing to follow a bolted roof.

The biggest implication of jumaring pitches rather than being belayed is that the rope doesn't move as you climb it. This makes sharp edges particularly dangerous. The leader should always be cautious with where the rope is running for their follower. You can either place gear to direct the rope away from edges, or pad sharp edges with duct tape. 

Texas Style Jumaring

The 'Texas' style of ascending a rope is how you'll clean most pitches. It involves having a ladder and a lanyard clipped to each of your jumars. Whilst standing on your lower ladder, you slide the top jumar to the limit of your reach, and then adjust the lanyard so it's tight. You shouldn't be limited in how far you can slide the jumar up, but you also want to be able to weight it without losing height. You then put your weight on the top ladder/lanyard, allowing you to slide the bottom jumar up. Repeat for 200' until you get to the top of the pitch.

At the start of a pitch, before the rope below is heavy enough to pull itself through the jumar, you might need to 'feather' the cam on the lower ascender. This is when you disengage it without taking the jumar off completely so that it can slide up the rope without pulling the rope up with it. 

If it gets steep it's easier to transfer the top ladder to the bottom jumar, so that you have two ladders low and just your lanyard connected to the top ascender. Now you can push more easily with both legs as you move the top ascender up, then sit on the lanyard as you move the lower jumar.

It's important to note that jumars can fairly easily come off the rope, so should be backed up. What you use as a backup depends on the situation. For ascending fixed ropes, a micro traxion is best as it follows effortlessly. If you are cleaning a pitch then I find a Grigri better. 

The traditional system to back up jumars was to clip into backup knots every 30 feet or so. This is still a good option to do below a Grigri if it's windy or if it's likely for a long rope loop to get snagged lower down. I find the easiest way of managing the rope below the Grigri is to untie from the end and let the whole thing dangle.

Cleaning Gear on a Rising Traverse

On a perfectly straight up pitch the best way to clean is to move your top ascender past the gear, then rest on its lanyard whilst you remove the gear. If the pitch is a rising traverse, weighting the ascender above the gear will suck the lower one up into the piece, making it hard to clean. The solution to this is as follows:

1. Position your jumars close together right below the piece to be cleaned.
2. Take in the slack on the Grigri until it's weighted just below your jumars
3. This allows you to take the top jumar off and move it to above the piece of gear to be cleaned. Move it high enough that the lanyard is weighted
4. On gentle rising traverses, it may be possible to pop the gear out from this position
5. If not, also move the lower jumar above the piece
6. You can now let rope through the Grigri to do a mini lower out from the piece until you're plumb in line with the next piece
7. Jumar up so you are level with the last piece
8. Now you should be able to reach the last piece to clean it

It's important to note that if your leader places long slings to extend runners, you can be left too far away from the previous piece to clean it. Another benefit I've found with the Alfifi is that in this case you can quickly hook it directly into the top piece, moving you closer to the piece to be cleaned without having to move your lanyards around.

Cleaning a Traverse/Roof

On a horizontal traverse it is possible to follow the steps for a rising traverse, but you will often be too low when hanging on your jumars below the next piece to easily clean the previous. It is often best to re-climb the pitch, removing the jumars from your ladders and aiding across the gear as if you were leading it, belaying yourself on the Grigri. 

To reiterate, it's vital for the leader to place gear often enough laterally for the second to be able to clean the previous piece whilst hanging plumb in line with the next, unless it's after a lower out point.

Lower outs

The ability to lower out off fixed gear is incredibly useful for following. It's often mandatory to follow a pendulum or hook traverse and allows the leader to conserve gear. There's two main ways of doing it depending on how much spare rope you have below you. The quickest way is to:

1. Jug up to the lower out point and take tight on the Grigri.
2. Move your ascenders past the quickdraw clipped to the lower out point.
3. Take a bight of rope from below the Grigri and pass it through the lower out ring
4. Clip this bight to your belay loop.
5. Pull the strand from this to the end of the rope to take yourself tight on this 4:1 advantage.
6. This should unweight the rope going through the quickdraw which can now be removed.
7. Slowly let the rope through your hands to lower out.
8. Once plumb in line, unclip the bite from your harness and pull it through the lower out point.

I prefer this method in most cases. You do need 4 times more spare rope than the distance of the lower out, so it isn't always possible. In those cases you'll have to do a 2:1 lower out. There's a couple ways of doing this. I tend to:

1. Jug up to lower out point and take tight on Grigri.
2. Move ascenders past lower out point.
3. Untie from the end of the rope.
4. Thread the end through the lower out point and tie back in.
5. Put my spare ATC on the other side.
6. Take tight on the ATC, remove the quickdraw and lower out.
7. Untie and pull the rope end back through.

A good way to practice this would be to do a pendulum off a sport route over to the next, then finish up that one and fix the rope. The second would then have to perform a lower out to get over to the second route from the top of the first. 

You can lower out from a ring or tat. If you see either on a fixed piece of gear then it's probably a good indicator that you should start back cleaning the next traverse. If you ever have to lower out off tat, be careful. My partner on the Wall of Early Morning Light had a piece of tat snap whilst lowering out and took an unexpected pendulum. If in doubt, cut the old stuff off and replace it with some new.

Team of 3

Climbing in a team of three can potentially slow you down if done badly, but can also actually speed you up if you have the right system. How good your system is mostly revolves around how you get the third climber up to the next belay. 

It's generally a bad idea for the third to be lowered out on the haul line with the bags and to ascend the weighted haul line. You end up bouncing a lot as you jug, which can saw through the rope if it's over any edge at all.

A safer method is for the spare to jumar the haul line before the bags are lowered out. This means that the second needs to wait for the third to jumar an entire pitch length before they can lower out the bag and start cleaning, which is really inefficient

The best way I've experienced climbing in a three involves a total of 4 ropes. In this scenario, once at the belay, the leader uses a tagline to pull up the top of the haul line and the top of a spare lead rope. They fix the lead line so the second can clean, the spare lead line so the third can start ascending immediately, and put the haul line through the PCP so the second can lower out the bags. 

This cuts out the time where both leader and second wait for the third to jumar the haul line. It also means that once the third is at the next belay, they'll have a spare lead rope to start leading the next pitch with the spare gear from the last pitch. In this case, someone can be leading, someone can be cleaning, and someone can be hauling and belaying all at the same time, as in the picture below.

The system becomes even more efficient if you start leading in blocks and short-fixing, whereby the leader can start rope soloing the next pitch immediately after finishing the previous.

The table below visibly demonstrates this. The first example has the third jugging the haul line. The second example has the third jugging a spare lead line and taking over leading. The third example has a leader short-fixing and block leading. Each example starts after the previous pitch is finished. The timings of each process are rough but equivalent.

This may all seem complicated and something you might try when you're more experienced, but in fact it is most effective for the inexperienced. It's better if you are all concurrently doing things slowly rather than waiting for each other to be slow before also being slow yourself. When I did Tangerine Trip with my slightly less experienced friends, I once finished leading the next pitch before the previous one had been cleaned.

One thing to avoid is what I observed on the Nose once. A French team was leading the route on half ropes, clipping both like twins through all the gear. The second and the third would then each jumar one of the skinny ropes and they'd both somehow clean the pitch. This is a lot of extra effort just to make the whole system slower and more dangerous. I wouldn't recommend this.

The next article in the series, focusing on Hauling, Living on the Wall, Efficiency, and Route Progression, will be published on the 8th September.