Carabiner Collection

<'94: lots of off-rope rock and tree climbing 1994: participated in my first ropes course event 1996: learned to belay 2001: tied my first prusik and first self-belayed climb 2006: first trad lead and bought my first full trad rack 2007: climbed my first redwood while roped in and ran my first ropes course event '07>: been professionally training and leading tree climbing and ropes work ever since. "

Both is fun. Also freestyle combinations, there might be a tree close to a rock and then one can just use both.

The ISA/TCIA host yearly regional climbing competitions. They're going on now. For anyone who hasn't seen what it's like for a skilled climber to rip around in a tree, they're open to the public, and I can't recommend them enough: https://www.itcc-isa.com/events/calendar

The competition had an Arborist get their climbing line strung up and anchored, climb the tree to touch 5 flags dispersed around the tree within a set time limit. The flagged branches had bells tied to them so they had to be nimble as well as fast. Touching a flag earned them points and ringing a bell cost them points. Of course one flag was located far out on a thin branch making it very difficult to reach without ringing the bell. They also had to do no damage to the tree in the process.

It was very interesting and I was talking to one of the competitors who explained their profession and how they travel around climbing trees for a variety of reasons from forestry and conservation to basic tree pruning. They are also required to be certified and that is handeled by the International Society of Arboriculture (I.S.A.) He also mentioned "target pruning" which is a term I was unaware of so I learned something. It certainly seems like an interesting and fun profession. I need to hire one to check out my big oak that is in need of a trim.

Agreed :)

(And joy in other people's passion might just be the antidote for the "rage at other people's thought" that seems to be becoming the norm these days ...)

From a general usage standpoint, Trango used to make a wiregate called the Classic Wiregate. It wasn't as easy to clip as the Hoodwire, but it was more symmetric, so you could use it for carabiner brakes and things of that nature. It was my go-to utility carabiner, but since it wasn't as flashy as crabs meant specifically for the rope end of a quickdraw, it never sold well enough and so they took it off the market. Turns out that a purely functional, no-frills carabiner couldn't compete with objectively worse carabiners (the Black Diamond Light D, or ugh the Omega Pacific Doval) because it didn't look as "classic".

Many manufacturers make terrifyingly small full-strength carabiners, but my experience with them is that they are so small that they're difficult to operate, so I have a surprising number of effectively keychain carabiners that are actually rated for climbing usage.

Sidebar, for life-saving equipment, climbers are bizarrely obsessed with how cool things look. The parenthetically mentioned Doval was a terrible carabiner, but it looked kind of neat, like a classic car with modern influences. It had an ovalized exterior, but a D-shaped interior, so it had all the clippability problems of an oval carabiner (can you determine where the gate's axle is, purely by feel, in under a second? not on a smooth oval carabiner), while maintaining the D's principle weakness (and why oval carabiners remain popular): under bodyweight and higher loads, a nearly-correctly positioned d-shaped carabiners will shift into the correct position, leading to a nerve-wracking drop. Oval carabiners will not do this under bodyweight loads (but also might not when faced with higher loads, somewhat compromising their ultimate strength, which is, because of the design, also somewhat lower than a d-shaped crab). When hanging on really tenuous anchors, that little drop has caused said anchors to fail, so direct-aid climbers have favored oval carabiners, even though they tend to be objectively worse carabiners in every other respect.

1: https://www.petzl.com/US/en/Professional/Connectors/Am-D