Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Random comment: Securing the trace eight with a second knot is really not necessary, as it is a self tightening knot. Most climbers don't do it, my climbing safety book doesn't show it and all gyms I've been too, sans one in Vancouver WA for some reason, don't require it. Rough rule is two fists length for the tail and you're good.

Another comment mentioned this too, it's much easier to untie if tied in a specific way and if you do lead climbing they usually show you the technique. You can also do it with a Yosemite finish for a similar improvement.

View on HN

If you clean a figure 8 really well, it's just as easy to untie after a whip as a bowline (okay, maybe not just as easy, but very close), and much much more universal for your partner to inspect.

The process I follow to ensure a clean knot every time:

1. Tie your figure 8, with the tail the same size every time (use your body as a ruler, testing a few lengths to get the perfect size)

2. Pass the tail up through your hard points so the knot is only a few inches from the bottom hard point.

3. Orient your knot so the tail is coming out of the bottom right side

4. This is the most important step! Instead of passing the tail through the inside of the knot when starting the followthrough, pass it in between the tail strand and the bottom right of the knot.

5. Follow through as normal. It should come out almost clean (eg no need to flip strands over each other)

6. For all 4 combos of top and bottom strand, yank them to make the knot very tight. The tighter and cleaner it is, the easier to untie after a whip.

7. If you do this all, the load strand will be on top, so no difficult flipped strands after a whip!

This is just my process, what's most important is doing something that works for you and that you can get right every time.

I just learned this from watching Hard is Easy on YouTube. And I've been climbing for 10 years!

I originally just stumbled upon it myself (when I first started I was reading a lot of topology books), but that video was great for showing the load strand effect! Felt great to have stumbled into the "right" way by accident

This is really regional. In some countries most people use the second knot, in others most don't. E.g. I've rarely seen it used in the US, but it's standard practice in much of europe.

Whichever you do, if you do it different to the majority view for the region you can often end up with some heavily-opinionated person coming up and telling you that you're doing it wrong so I mostly switch depending on where I am. It's easier than trying to explain that [whichever way] is fine and common practice elsewhere.

Funny. Had to do it in a Boston gym, never saw it anywhere in Europe.

I was taught that the 2nd knot just provides quick visual proof that the tail is long enough to not pull through under load.

Yes, exactly. It's a test rather than a functional feature. It's useful in a group context for visually checking safety. However, it can be less safe for shorter people and children, especially on a thick, worn rope - it can end up as a solid block which accelerates rapidly to face height during a fall.

in the american northeast, backup knots on a figure 8 are relatively common in gyms and rare at the crag. (and when you do see them at the crag, they're a good gumby detector)

About 5-6 years ago the gyms became much more honest in their instruction for new climbers, and will now actually say the quiet part out loud, which is that a backup knot is really there to 1. ensure that new climbers leave enough of a tail on the figure 8 and 2. are a way to prevent that probably extremely conservative tail from whacking you in the balls when you take a whipper.

sport gyms absolutely do not like people who insist on tying in with a bowline.

Ive also always been in the the camp that this "backup" knot isn't backing up anything. If you want to finish the knot, the correct way to do it would be a Yosemite finish.

Yep, that works well.

The balancing act the gyms, in particular, are trying to play is that knots should be both secure and easily verifiable on sight by gym staff, more or less entirely for liability reasons. A yosemite finish, or a bowline, are both dead-ass safe and in some cases better than a traced eight, but they're harder to glance at and know they're safe. That's totally fine at the crag, but it's a liability issue at the gym.

I would never trust my safety to a bowline. It comes loose with a minimum of working. Only under constant load would I use it, and only then when double hitched, and probably with a finisher clove hitch.

Even my dog gets away from a bowline with a minimum of moving around the front yard.

I rarely see people tying in with a single bowline, for the reason you give. I've been using a double bowline with a stopper knot (http://www.vdiffclimbing.com/double-bowline/) for many years now (well, at least outside of the climbing gym). I've never had an issue with the knot loosening when not under load. The usual complaint I hear from people about using it to tie-in is that it is harder for your partner to visually verify. The figure-8 follow-through is very easy to visually check.

ETA: The last person I saw tie-in with a single bowline was Christian Griffith (of Verve fame) using it to tie-back in after cleaning the anchors of a warm-up in the Ruckman Cave at Rifle Mountain Park. He also didn't secure the rope whe he untied to thread the anchors, choosing instead to just step on it. Not exactly a great example of anchor safety...

Yep, that double bowline with stopper is what I was referring to. Trouble is, it is now almost as challenging to tie as the fig-8 loop / trace.

a usual reason to use it outdoors is that it’s easier to untie than a figure 8 when the rope is dirty or frozen or you were whipping on it for hours.

yes, sorry: i absolutely meant double bowline there. Sloppy.

and when you do see them at the crag, they're a good gumby detector

Huh, really? Most of the people I know who tie-in with the figure-8 use the standard overhand safety knot (or they pull the tail back through the bottom loop of the eight). Most of us have been climbing for decades. I guess old habits die hard?

they do.

maybe excessively long tails are a better sign…

I recall being taught it just so the rope doesn't hang around, get caught on things and bother you.

Same - it's not really functional as much as that it keeps the end from being annoying. The alternative is doing a yosemite finish, which a number of my friends prefer.

This is exactly right. It can be especially useful when lead climbing, as it eliminates the risk of accidentally grabbing the tail. Grabbing the tail is unlikely to result in safety risks (unless you have an obscene amount of it), but the less time you have to spend fumbling with your rope while lead climbing, the better.

stupid question from a sailor: how does a trace eight differ from a standard figure of eight?

It's a loop knot made using a figure-8, then retracing the knot with the tail. Climbers use it where sailors would tend to use a bowline. I've heard various reasons why: "it's easier to teach people in the gym", "it's harder to get wrong", "the dynamic ropes climbers use put bowlines at risk of capsizing".

The reasons are all correct; in addition:

1. It's very easy to visually check (five pairs of parallel lines) (by easy I don't just mean reliably, I also mean low effort, which is important because you do it a lot - point fingers at the pairs of parallel lines: "two four six eight ten"). It's very symmetric. If done wrong it tends to look radically different.

2. It requires pulling in 2 places in different directions to come undone. The bowline opens if you pull in 1 bad spot.

(3. In the gym, you can just leave the normal figure eight on the rope, which saves the next climber a bit of time. Not a lot, but it's a nice feature.)

I've been sailing since I was seven years old, and I still have to think when I'm tying a bowline. So I can believe the comment about it being easier to teach.

My understanding why bowlines are disliked in climbing community is that it may fail if the pull does not come from the long tail, but from inside the loop. That is, cliiping two carabiners to bowline loop and pulling the carabiners apart is not a safe way to use bowline.

Nobody does a bowline, that's insane because you can't ring-load (cross-load) it. [0]

Europeans sometimes do the double bowline (traced), but the naming is ambiguous in english, so you have to google double bowline on a bight.

Americans used to do yosemite bowlines, but that fell out of fashion because figure eight (safe and foolproof) and double bowline (safe, trivial to untie after hefty lead falls) cover literally every use case perfectly.

[0]: https://www.saferclimbing.org/en/blog/cross-loading-on-knots

A bowline with stopper is a pretty common climbing knot in the UK [0]. I don't have the expertise to weigh into any debates about how safe it is, but I've seen a lot of people use it without incident, and there's no question it's easier to untie than a rethreaded figure-eight.

[0] https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/skills/how_to_tie_in_to_...

Also, Adam Ondra routinely climbs using this tie-in method for the reasons you mention.

The yosemite variant is fine, but maybe we shouldn't take the world's best climber as a reference who has a lot more context and experience to make very measured tradeoffs:

> IMPORTANT: This knot is methodically NOT recommended and yes, it MAY untie while you are climbing. It can happen if your rope is new-ish (and that means it slides easily) and if you don’t tighten the knot with a lot of force. I am always splashing chalk on the knot in case of new rope to increase the friction and I do tighten it with a lot of force. The reasonable and recommended alternative, pretty common and very safe is double bowline. It is almost as big as eight, but at least it is always easy to untie.

https://adamondra.com/updates/my-climbing-more-about-feeling...

I've been using a double bowline with the Yosemite-style stopper for a long time (I've also heard it referred to a Jack's bend, but I can't find anything quickly to confirm that). Some people give me a hard time about using a double bowline, saying it is "unsafe," but their reason usually boils down to "it's hard to visually inspect." My belay partners (very small list, because I don't let just anyone belay me on lead) typically remind me to re-check my knot just before I leave the ground.

It's generally agreed that it is totally safe (it solves the crossloading issue). I think we can all stick with the proven safe knots that we are comfortable with, and the fact it makes partner check a bit trickier applies also to the double bowline on a bight. I'm equally happy to triple-check myself and make it clear to my belayers that they are off the hook there.

Here is my pitch for "doppelter bulin" (double bowline on a bight):

Even if by some miracle the ENTIRE retraced half of that knot came undone, you would STILL be tied in with a normal bowline. I do a stopper knot too, but I think that illustrates just how bomber it is. And I only use it for single pitches for lead falls, on multipitches I still simply do a figure 8, because why get fancy?

The trace eight goes "back" into itself, leaving a loop at the end. When making the knot, you make it so that the loop goes through your climbing harness, like this: https://wildsummits.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/knot-cover...

While the eight you use for sailing is mostly a stop knot at the end of the rope. So two very different uses.

The only real difference is the trace version you can tie into an existing loop where with the bight version you need a carabiner to connect in. Every time I've done climbing or repelling we've just used carabiners instead of tying directly into the rope.

I don't think theres any difference in the final knot - its how you tie it. Tying a figure of eight in the rope and then re-tracing it back is necessary because your harness loops (not shown in the pic) will be in the bight. I'm guessing a sailor wouldn't need to tie anything into the bight, so retracing wouldn't be necessary.

I've never heard of a fig-eight being referred to as "trace" but this may be an US-ism and I'm European.

You can tie a trace 8 directly into an existing loop like your climbing harness where an 8 on a bight needs a carabiner. Most people would just use a carabiner anyways though.

The more correct term would probably be a figure 8 on a bight. But since climbing harnesses have permanently sewn loops to tie into you can't actually tie it on a bight. You retrace the knot. Otherwise it's a standard figure 8 knot with a loop coming out one end.

Indeen! I've been taught that securing the trace eight could be dangerous when, in case of emergency, another rope is (supposedly) attached to the trace eight, but accidentally attached between the trace eight and the securing knot.

Same if you're lead climbing, there is a small chance (if you left a longish tail end) to clip the wrong part of the rope. If if it does not directly result in a dangerous fall you might trap yourself inside a quickdraw.

I'm UK-based - was taught to tie the 2nd knot every time, and always do. Does seem to be regional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com