Pick the Right Rock Climbing Latches

Video Transcript

"Now I'll go over some of the basic gear that you're also going to use in addition to the rope and harness and shoes. This is your basic carabiner. These are what's called crabs in Canada. This is what connects you between your rope and your harness or really between the rope and anything else. They've got a gate on them and then the rope's going to go through one. Whatever else you clip it to is going to go through the other end and it'll hold just like that. You want it lined up with the spine in the direction of the pull because that's its strongest, strongest aspect. This is also a carabiner. This is a locking one. So on the gate on this one, it's got a little barrel that you can twist. When that's twisted up, you can't open the carabiner. So it's a lot safer. You're going to use that for a lot of applications here. These are two different belay devices that we use. This is a basic one called a ATC or an air traffic controller. This is a more advanced one called a Gri-Gri. It's an auto locker and it basically will catch the rope even if you don't when you're belaying someone up. We'll show you that a little later. This is called a cordelette. It's kind of like a very short rope or a very long sling and it's going to be used to build anchors. This is your basic sling. It's made out of nylon or spectra which is originally designed for the military. It's very strong. This can hold thousands and thousands of pounds. So they're great for rock climbing and then this last one is called a daisy chain. You're going to use this to attach yourself to the rock any time you're not using the rope. So if you're building an anchor or something, this is going to keep you safe until you have that anchor built. We'll go over anchors in a second. We'll show you how that's used. "