I stumbled across this video today : youtube.com/watch?v=Vrac4j7… it shows Patrick Berhault sport climbing and dance climbing. If you look closely at the sport climb, it seems he unclips a quickdraw that is already clipped to the rope, and clips it into the bolt. Is this a Berhault thing, a French thing, or a style of the time? I have never seen this on the rock before, but for short routes, it seems like a good idea.
Phil Lauffen wrote:I think if you fell on it the force would break your gear loop. I think some people clip the rope first, then the draw.
If you fell, it wouldn't load your gear loop at all; only quickdraws on the wall will be weighted. It seems like after about 5 quickdraws, this method would get annoying and clustered.
Whatever.. he'd be a big fat nobody without those pink Speedos!
Funny thing is when I first started climbing, we did that. It evolved into leaving a couple pre-clipped at the knot for hard clips then we stopped entirely once we saw no one else was doing it because all we really wanted was to fit in with the cool kids.
I think Todd Skinner was the first person I saw do that. I did it a few times in the 80s. At one point a company put small vecro loops on gear slings and on harness waist belts. Heck I remember when we started putting two carabiners on a shoulder length sling to make "quickdraws" rather than clipping a biner into the bolt/pin, then a shoulder length, then another carabiner to clip the rope to. Cams were considered cheating once too!
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