Natural Anchors: Tips on Rock Climbing

"Hi! I’m Brian from Eastern Mountain Sports on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip we’ll be discussing utilizing natural anchors for top roping. When top roping you’re using a fixed anchor at the top of your cliff or your rock that you’re going to be climbing, in order to place that fixed anchor for your rope to run through you’re going to need certain points to tie off of and the most basic and easiest points to use are natural anchors. Some forms of natural anchors would be large boulders that you can wrap your webbing around or trees, the most basic type of webbing is going to be your one inch tubular webbing, it comes in all sorts of sizes and most places will be able to cut them to specific lengths. When using your natural anchors you’re going to want to make sure that you wouldn’t ever question from the first time what you’re using. In a instance where you’re using a tree, personally I would like to use a tree thicker than five inches this is because all of your weight is going to be on these anchors. So it’s always, always, always a good idea to have at least three anchors and using your three anchors you can have a combination of two trees and a rock or three rocks or three trees. Either way you want to make sure that your anchors are sturdy enough that your body weight can hold on each one individually, from that point you’re going to want to run from your anchors over the edge of your cliff and from there you would take your webbing and from each anchor you would make them connect all at one common point and from there you would hook your carabiner that your rope will be running through, from your three fixed points you should have enough protection that any kind of fall weight is going to be supported by those natural anchors."