How to Tie Rappelling Knots

Video Transcript

"Hello, this is Andrew Reynolds, and today I'm going to show you how to make a rappelling knot. Basically if you're up climbing and you need to get down really fast through rappelling, but one of your ropes would not be sufficient to get you there because of course you double up those ropes in rappelling, and you want to join them together, this is how most rappellers would do it. So basically you take your first knot, and all climbers know your figure eight knot, but I'll show you really quick. Basically you just lap the rope kind of over itself, and then go back around the rope and then go through the little loop that you created. And of course you can see why they call it a figure eight knot. So then you would take your next rope and bring it in. Basically all you're going to do is trace your original figure eight knot. So I can see that if I'm tracing this knot that it first comes through this hole, and then the next thing it does is come around this bend, and then I can see that it actually comes right through this hole right here, so I'm going to complete that, or complete that idea, we still have one more step to go. You can see that I'm just tracing it and making it look twice as much as it was before. And the last thing it does is that it comes up around here and comes up through this hole, so we're going to do that with that rope as well. Now this is a very typical knot used in climbing, it's very secure, but when we're rappelling our life is especially on the line. So what we're going to do is kind of do a fisherman's knot on either side of it. So basically you just go over the rope, back behind where the knot started, and up, and that's your fisherman's knot. And do the same thing on the other side, go around the rope, back before the knot started and up through. And this just gives an extra set of strengths, so that if god forbid something would happen to this original knot, that it would at least slip through and catch each other on a fisherman's knot just as it would in a typical fisherman's knot. So that is your rappelling knot. Thanks for watching."