How to Tie an Icicle Hitch Knot

Series Summary

Those of us living amidst the mountains of sky scrapers, fields of concrete, and the rivers of highways can truly appreciate the adventure of camping in the pristine great outdoors. Even though a day or two in the wild may be enough to make us drive to the nearest Holiday Inn, there is a relaxing quality to living simply in the woods and enjoying nature. While it is simpler there are tasks to be done that are unfamiliar to us that make camping not quite as simple as staying at home. Consequently many times the camping experience is more stressful than relaxing. However, preparations can be made and skills improved before “roughing it”. One such skill that is important to master in order to camp successfully is knot tying. A broad base of knot tying knowledge will allow you to secure tent poles, carry bottles, and secure tarps and tents to stakes and trees.

In this free video series learn how to tie knots from knot tying expert and outdoor enthusiast Robert Segundo. Dan will demonstrate how to tie the bowline knot, double bowline knot, the cat's paw, as well as how to tie the halter hitch; how to tie the true lovers knot; how to tie the ring hitch and many others you probably have never heard of before but just might need in a pinch.

Video Transcript

"Now the icicle hitch are great hitch to use if you need to tie a nice hitch on a smooth surface that you know if it is a open end or something where it might slip off. If you use the icicle hitch it would hold very tight and it would not slip off. So if you look down here I would show you how this is done. We are going to take the length of rope that I have here. I have a lot of rope so I'm going to need for my hitch here. What I'm going to do is tie, I'm going to start off first with just a over hand loop over the side here. Then I'm going to complete one more loop, 2, we are going to do one more 3. Because this is going to give up our strength whenever this line is pulled or standing in here is pulled this know would actually spread out and hold. So I'm going to go ahead and what you do with your working end is you put a loop in it like so and you wrap your working end back under and over. Let me turn this so you can see this. You just want to pull your working in back over like so and put your working end right along your standing end. You are just going to take this and twist it and pull a loop like this. Now what happens is when this line gets a lot of weight on it this would actually spread out. This hitch would pull. I don't have quiet enough here to demonstrate but this is all you have to do for a basic icicle hitch."