Vertical caving terminology and methods > Rigging methods and equipment
By far the dominant approach used in Europe, and most other parts of the world. Ropes are treated as a resource that should not be wasted. Rub points are avoided wherever possible, though rope rub protection may be needed in rare cases where a rub point cannot be avoided. Traverse lines, rebelays and deviations are used to avoid rub points and other hazards such as water (without creating new hazards, such as a short end). This requires more knowledge of techniques, and rigging can take longer, but typically takes less rope, since anchors can be placed appropriately where they are needed, instead of having to find the best natural some distance away from the pitch. When naturals are used, a sling is typically used to connect to them. Backups are used to provide redundancy or protection when approaching the pitch head. Although passing a knot may be needed in very rare cases, is almost always avoided by joining ropes at rebelays or other convenient points. Alpine rigging uses thinner and more flexible ropes than indestructible rope technique, so Alpine rigging needs fewer people and less effort to carry the ropes through the cave. Typically 10 mm or 10.5 mm rope is used, but 9 mm is often used during exploration, and sometimes during regular caving. European Alpine rigging ropes are made from nylon which can absorb higher shock loads if things go wrong, but cannot cope with so much damage in places where rub points are unavoidable. They bounce more, which exaggerates this effect, and being thin makes both the bounce and the damage more significant. Ropes used for indestructible rope technique are made from polyester which is more abrasion resistant, but cannot absorb shock loads, so they do not offer protection from things going wrong, such as someone falling onto a traverse line, or an anchor failing. With Alpine rigging, cavers can use separate hangs on the same pitch at the same time, and do not have to wait for each other to finish the pitch.
Historically, one of the major uses for ropes was to protect people from drops, and this will have been in use during building work by the Romans, possibly as early as 500 BCE. It is not known if earlier cultures used ropes in that way, but it is quite possible that they would have been used in China. Traverse lines for traversing have been used in mountaineering since its early days, likely to have been during the 1700s or 1800s. Rudamentary traverse lines had been in use for a very long time in caving, with protection added around drops, particularly in showcaves, since the 1800s. French caver Henry P. Guérin shows their use in 1944, using pitons as anchors, for crossing an actual traverse. The same publication shows that ladders might be hung between two attachment points on opposite sides of a pitch, similar to a Y-hang, if they needed to descend the pitch in a position where there was nothing useful to connect the ladder to. Cabled traverse lines appeared in Ogof Ffynnon Ddu in Britain in 1951 (Maypole Series wire traverse), and then a segmented traverse with intermediate anchors made in the same year (Bolt Traverse). At that time, long term traverses and fixed aids often used large diameter expansion bolts. In 1959, American cavers John Patton and Gunther Schmidt used a pulley instead of a carabiner to create a deviation-like structure to avoid rub points at the lip of a pitch, resulting in what looked like a Y-hang. This was pulled to such an angle that the deviation tether had to support the full weight of the caver, so it could not be used like a deviation, and since it did not offer redundancy, it could not function as a Y-hang either. Getting past it would need the caver to be able to stand on solid ground, since it would have required too much strength to use it like a normal deviation, but it still needed to be treated like a deviation, unclipping it from the rope to get past it. Using a pulley made this much more laborious, so the suggestion was not to pass it, and instead just manually climb up the wall, using the pulley's tether as a handline. Traverse lines can be seen in American caving pictures from the mid 1960s.
Alpine rigging was not discussed in vertical caving manuals in 1969, and at that point, the BlueWater polyester ropes that were available had less need for it, as they were more resistant to damage from rub points, as long as large amounts of rope rub protection was used. Cavers, however, needed to be protected from hazards like water and loose rocks, and the indestructible rope technique rigging did not provide any safe approaches there. In 1972, Nick Reckert of the Cambridge University Caving Club wrote about methods and equipment for potholing, much of which had been learned in France. He advised using a double belay in case one fails, but did not say if he was referring to a Y-hang or a backup. However, by 1973, the first edition of Techniques de la Spéléologie Alpine by French cavers Jean Claude Dobrilla and Georges Marbach shows that they had both taken part in developing the initial stages of Alpine rigging. By that year, there were backups, minimal traverse lines and rebelays, as well as the idea of using spits as anchors to avoid rub points and hazards exactly where they were needed. Traverse lines generally did not use intermediate anchors. Y-hangs were only used to hang ladders, not for SRT. The overhand on a bight was almost the only knot used, but the lark's foot and clove hitch were used when rebelaying a lifeline at the top of a ladder. In 1974, American caver Sam Pitthan suggested using a deviation-like structure to avoid rub points at the lip of a pitch, but did so in a way that would cause the deviation to have to support more than the total weight of the caver. It did not function as either a deviation or a Y-hang, as the caver would not be able to temporarily remove it in order to get past it, and was very similar to the approach used by John Patton and Gunther Schmidt 15 years earlier.
By 1977, an SRT manual by Australian caver Neil R. Montgomery shows that a very complete approach also including Y-hangs and deviations was in use in Europe and Australia, though traverse lines would later earn more intermediate anchors. This allowed the more supple and slightly less static European ropes to be used safely. Many of the common knots were in use, but the Y-hang knots and butterfly knot had not yet appeared, though these were added over the subsequent years. In Britain, the developments during the 1970s were pioneered from around 1974 onwards by Mike Meredith, Paul Ramsden, Dave Elliot, Dusty Spenser et al., mostly in Northern England, while in Australia they were pioneered by Neil R. Montgomery et al., with many aspects of them developed throughout Europe. Alpine rigging became the main approach in Britain starting in 1980. Alpine rigging has since been adopted in some parts of the USA since the 1990s too, but there are still very significant parts of the USA where it is not used. In the early 1980s, spit anchor installation and maintainance started to be officially managed by caving councils in Britain. P-hangers were developed in the late 1980s, and they became the normal anchors used in British caves starting from 1991. However, spits were still used for a number of years in various regions. The very occasional use of Abalakov threads in British caves and expeditions will have existed since drills were used around the 1990s (and could have been used before then with star drills), though this will have increased with the introduction of lithium ion drills in 2005. However, at the time of writing (2023), these are only used on a very small scale, such as with fixed handlines or deviations, and not used extensively to rig major potholes. They had been used during the exploration of ice caves and glacier caves, reported as used by British cavers in 2011 (the Abalakov thread was invented by Russian Vitaly Abalakov around 1934), but they remained uncommon in limestone. From around 2020, some French caves started to be prepared using Abalakov threads that were drilled for amarrage souples, with the most notable example being the Gouffre Berger.
This history section only covers alpine rigging. This article also has a detailed history of many of the other devices and techniques that are used for vertical caving.
<< Rigging methods and equipment | Ultralight rigging >>
This page is not intended to be viewed this way, please load the entire article. This version exists only to make it easier for search engines to understand the contents.