Vertical caving terminology and methods > Ladders, climbs and older techniques
What it sounds like. Specifically an electron ladder, with the sides made from very thin wire that looks far too thin to support your weight, and rungs made from an aluminium alloy. These should always be removed from the cave after use, and not trusted if left underground, because the wires rust quickly. Electron ladders can be coiled up, and transported in and out of caves relatively easily. They are used in places where you do not want to carry in separate sets of SRT gear for each person, or in cases where people have not learned how to do SRT. Resists abrasion far better than a rope. Requires much more arm strength (very tiring on big pitches), and does not provide safety near a pitch head. Because the ladder is flexible, climbing on a free-hang involves hugging the ladder and holding it from the back of the rungs, and normally using one foot behind the rungs as well. Climbing over a rub point or up a sloping pitch can be very difficult, since your weight pulls the ladder against the rock. As a result, you may need to grip onto rungs with fingertips, or pull one side of the ladder away from the rock so that the rungs can be used. Although training is required to learn how to climb a flexible ladder, this is minimal compared with SRT. Requires a lifeline for safety while climbing, and this also requires training.
Most designs have small C-links on each end of the wires, so that ladders can be linked into longer ladders, or connected to a spreader or wire trace so that they can be attached to an anchor or natural. The links can also be used to attach thin carabiners. Some designs just have a swaged eyelet, and rely on maillons instead of C-links, since maillons are normally much stronger. To avoid damaging the ladder or reducing its strength, each side wire must not diverge more than 20° from perpendicular to the first rung, where it emerges from it, which is why a spreader or wire trace is used.
The minimum breaking strength of a ladder is somewhat complex. The wire used to make an electron ladder can usually hold 500 kg or more when new, but the exact amount depends on the wire that is used. As an example, 3 mm wire might hold 6 kN or 611 kg, and 4 mm wire might hold 10 kN or 1019 kg. The swaged eyelets at each end hardly reduce the strength at all, and the quoted strengths are given for wires with swaged eyelets. Since there are two wires per ladder, the overall strength could be assumed to be around 12 kN or 1223 kg for a ladder made with 3 mm wire. If C-links are used, the strength of a C-link becomes the weakest part of the wires, at around 2.5 kN or 255 kg per side, so the maximum strength is now 510 kg. The rungs are surprisingly strong, but their strength will depend on which epoxy or crimp has been used to connect them to the wire, how wide they are, where you stand on the rung, and how wide your boots are (which is why it is difficult to find the strength ratings for electron ladders). The rungs might grip the wires with a strength of 4 kN or 408 kg per side, so a total of 816 kg between both sides. The rungs themselves might hold 2.8 kN or 285 kg, when loaded at the middle of the rung over a width of at least 18 mm. In other words, you are not supposed to clip a carabiner directly to a rung, since it is much narrower than 18 mm. The rungs are designed for hands and feet, not carabiners. Assuming they are used correctly, this means that the weakest point of a ladder is the middle of a rung, at 285 kg per rung. While climbing, typically at least 2 or 3 rungs are used at once, so the ladder can hold more than 285 kg during normal use, but this reduces to 285 kg if you hang off a single rung with your hands. An electron ladder in good condition is easily able to take the weight of a caver, even if the weakest part has only a tenth the strength of a carabiner.
Manufacturers may specify a rated load, saying how much load they should be used with, rather than the load that they will break at. As an example, a ladder matching all of these strength measurements might have its maximum rated load listed as 100 kg for caving electron ladders or 140 kg for access usage, about half the weight that could cause a rung to break. This is to allow for the impulse forces that might be experienced as you move around on the rungs, for the unexpected forces at rub points, and for the extra load when multiple ladders are linked together. Manufacturers may also state that only one person should use a ladder at once, even if it might be strong enough to hold two people at the same time. These ratings are given by Lyon, one of the manufacturers that actually gives ratings for their ladders - thanks Lyon! However, it is worth noting that even if a ladder is tested and has strength ratings, flexible ladders cannot be considered PPE, and a lifeline is always needed for safety.
After being used for some time, wear and tear causes some strength of the wires to be lost. Rusted ladders lose most of their strength. From personal experience, with a ladder that had been left in a cave for years, where one strand had rusted enough to snap completely when someone tried to climb the ladder, the remaining strand looked rusted too, but two people hanging on it together could not snap it. In the end, it only snapped when two people spun around in circles on it, and caused it to twist severely then snap. The rungs did not fail. In many other cases, ladders left in caves for months or years have rusted to the point that the wires simply disintegrate, leaving the rungs scattered on the floor, holding on to tiny rusted stubs of wire. When rust sets in, it is almost always the wires that end up as the weakest parts of a ladder, even though they were originally the strongest.
Stone staircases were built in Tell Qaramel, Syria, around 11000-10000 BCE, Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, in 8950 BCE, and the Tower of Jericho, Palestine, somewhere between 9400 and 8000 BCE (none of which are ladders, but it helps to put things into perspective). The oldest known evidence of a ladder was found in a cave painting in Cuevas de la Araña in Valencia, Spain from 8000 BCE. The painting showed either a grass rope, rope ladder or liana vines being climbed by two people, to collect honey from a bees' nest (it is hard to tell exactly what is being depicted, since it is just three vertical lines with only a single potential rung, so perhaps it is best to leave the experts to argue about that one). The oldest known conclusive evidence of a rigid ladder was found at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which would have been used to enter a house via a roof opening, thought to be from 6500 BCE. It consisted of a thick, wooden plank (like a railway sleeper), with a set of notches carved into it, which could be used as steps, like an extremely steep staircase. Another cave painting in Barranco Gómez cave in Sistema Ibérico, Spain, from around 5500 BCE shows a rope ladder (likely to have been made from grass) being climbed to collect honey from a bees' nest. The ladder's structure is very clear, with chained loops of rope used as rungs, the ladder being connected at its top, and reconnected to the rock part way down using a pole. The person climbing it is shown hugging the ladder, the most appropriate way to climb a rope ladder. Egyptians were using rigid ladders very similar to a modern wooden ladder, to scale Canaanite city walls during sieges from at least 2400 BCE. One depicted in the tomb of Kaiemheset was shown with wheels so it could be easily moved, and one from the tomb of Senedjemib Inti was shown without wheels.
Ladders feature in many religious scriptures and stories, and while the dates that the stories first appeared is not known, the dates that they were written can be used to show that ladders were in use at that point. There are stories about Chinese legendary 神農 (Emperor Shennong) who supposedly lived from 2737 to 2697 BCE and used a rattan (liana) ladder to climb a mountain. There are other stories about Chinese legendary 帝舜 (Emperor Shun) who supposedly lived sometime between 2294 and 2184 BCE and used a ladder to get onto a roof. However, the stories were not written down until some time before 296 BCE in the earliest case, and are very unlikely to have any basis in historical fact (especially since Shennong's ladder supposedly transformed into a forest). Rigid ladders were described in the pyramid texts of Egyptian pharaoh Unas, in approximately 2315 BCE, as ladders were thought to carry the soul to the afterlife, and might be left in the tombs for the dead pharaoh to use. Pharaoh Pepi II's pyramid texts specifically mention rope ladders and rigid ladders, at around 2185 BCE. Hebrew religious texts mention ladders at approximately 1779 BCE (specifically Jacob's Ladder), though the story itself was actually written around 1000 years later. The story is almost certainly derived from the Egyptian ideas about ladders being used to reach the afterlife.
Harrow Hill, Cissbury Ring and Grime's Graves are late Neolithic flint mining sites in Britain, each with hundreds of mine shafts from 6-13 metres deep, dating from 4000-2200 BCE, 4000-3500 BCE and 2650-2300 BCE respectively (Harrow Hill has some slightly older open cast pits). The common conjecture is that ladders would be needed to access the mines, most often suggested as being made from a tree trunk with notches cut into it (depicted and described by English Heritage's own information). An alternative suggestion is that rope ladders made from plaited leather with wooden rungs could have been used, hung from trees placed over the shafts. (The conjecture was made because of evidence that a beam was placed over one shaft, and grooves at the start of passages that were not where a ladder could have been, both of which suggest hauling the flint using ropes, not ladders.) However, there is absolutely no supporting evidence for either of these approaches, and no evidence that suggests either type of ladder were known in Britain in the Stone Age. In fact, the only ladders known in Britain are much later, and of too low a quality to be capable of reaching the depths needed, suggesting that there had not been any more advanced ladders in use during the Neolithic. The oldest ladders in Britain are a series of notched log ladders found in water holes and gravel pits, with one from Pode Hole Quarry probably dating from the earliest part of 1623-1463 BCE, and another from Bar Pasture dating from 1316 BCE, both near Peterborough in The Fens, (about 57 km from the Grime's Graves site). Several more examples have been found in southern England all the way up to around 500 BCE, and a 2.3 metre long example from 1300-1100 BCE is considered long. It is likely that there are older ones too, but the details are missing or hard to find, and often behind expensive paywalls. Two notched log ladders were found in San Lorenzo a Greve in Tuscany, Italy, dated to 1616-1464 BCE and 1440-1400 BCE.
Hitite carvings from Turkey show rigid ladders being used by acrobats some time after 1400 BCE. An 8 metre long, 1.2 metre wide wooden staircase was built in the Salzwelten Hallstatt salt mine in Austria in 1344 BCE, and was surprisingly well preserved by the salt. It was constructed in the format of a wooden ladder laid onto a slope, with the gaps filled in with rubble and planks to create flat steps, though the rungs were not fixed to the sides. It is therefore likely to be one of the first ladders or staircases to be used underground (except for the ladders left in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs). Egyptian mining took place in mines with short, vertical shafts, particularly on the Sinai Peninsula, somewhere between 1550 BCE and 1069 BCE. The methods used to climb those shafts is not known, and it could have involved ladders, ropes or chimneying, but the absense of trees on the peninsula makes ladders less likely. In the Book of Odes by 孔子 (Confucius), poem 241 - possibly written as late as 476 BCE - states that Chinese 周文王 (King Wen of Zhou) used ladders during a battle that took place in 1051 BCE. The Chinese are likely to have been using bamboo ladders at some time around then, but there is no historical record of when they were introduced to China. The Assyrians started to use siege ladders after 900 BCE. The Chinese started to use wheeled siege ladders called cloud ladders some time after 475 BCE (with their invention attributed to 鲁班, Lu Ban, another deity figure). Chinese ladders often would be made from a trunk with small pegs stuck into it. Deneholes were 10-40 metre deep bell pit mines used to mine chalk in Kent and Essex in southern Britain, while minimising the damage to the surface land. Their use started before the Roman conquest in 43 CE, and continued until around the late 1300s, with only minimal changes in the approach used (later versions used different approaches). Their most active use was around 1225, when permission was given for every man to have a chalk (marl) mine on his own land. In many cases, notched footholds were dug into one wall or opposing walls of the shafts, to allow them to be used as a ladder to access the mine. This approach is still used today with some caves, particularly when the entrance is lined with concrete rings, where holes are notched into the concrete. Roman mining was most likely to have used ladders, and although there is no conclusive evidence of exactly when the practice would have started, the Romans were actively mining with highly technological approaches, between 100 BCE and 200 CE.
The more normal ladders with rungs arrived in Britain after the Roman conquest of 43 CE. Rope ladders are thought to have been used by Jewish people to access various caves around the Dead Sea in what was then Judea or the Roman Empire, now Israel and Palestine, starting from before 68 CE, where they then hid the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Cave Of Horror is thought to have needed rope ladders when it was accessed between 132 and 135 CE. However, there is no actual evidence for this, and the caves may have been accessible without needing any ladder or rope in the past simply by following animal paths, while the landscape could have now changed to require equipment. This is especially likely given that a burial from 4000 BCE was found in the same cave, and climbing a ladder while carrying a body would have been prohibitively difficult. Ladders are not thought to have been used inside the caves themselves. While it is likely that rigid ladders were used in caves by various people over the years to mine guano or collect birds' nests (likely bamboo structures in southeast Asia, as early as the year 800), or to explore caves that were found during mining operations (when Pen Park Hole was discovered in Britain in 1669, it was assumed that it had been found and explored by miners some time in the early 1600s, but there is no actual evidence for this), the dates of that are not usually known, so this section largely covers only active cave exploration as a sport. In 1321-1337, the Scaligeri princes of Verona were modifying a cave called Covolo di Butistone in Verona, now Italy. It was being used as a fortress, rather than for active cave exploration. They mined rooms, which needed a ladder to get between two of the floors (though it is possible that the upper rooms were added by later users of the fortress). It is assumed that they used one, and conveniently, their coat of arms features an image of a rigid siege ladder, so it is highly likely that they did. There is a suggestion that the Chinese might have been using rope ladders in caves in the 1300s or 1400s, but there is no verifiable source for this, and it is likely to have been just one person's assumption, rather than actual fact. Miners in general used rigid ladders, constructed from stemples or other solid structures. Numerous clever ladder designs (click "Verso"), including several rope ladders, were depicted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1486 in Codex Atlanticus in the Holy Roman Empire, now Italy. Several of these have since been used for caving, including ladders made from a knotted handline, though mostly through reinvention.
The oldest verifiable evidence of a rigid ladder being used in a cave is from 1656, where rigid wooden ladders were being used by tourists in Baumannshöhle in Germany, before it later became a proper showcave. This can be seen in a sketch survey of the cave made by visiting student Von Alvensleben in that year (though the drawing is particularly difficult to interpret, and it does not look much like a ladder). The first known use of rope ladders for cave exporation purposes is from 1673 in Greece, when French ambassador Charles-Marie-François Ollier, Marquis de Nointel, along with Turkish sailors and officers (including Cornelius Magni, who wrote about it) explored the Σπήλαιο της Αντιπάρου (Cave of Antiparos), using rigid and rope ladders with lifelines, which were procured from the ship they were sailing in. The cave included a 23 metre pitch. In 1669 British captain Samuel Sturmy and his team including a miner named Dick explored Pen Park Hole, using a rigid ladder to climb up into a side passage. One notable British exception where rope ladders were well documented in mining is Lamb Leer Cavern, where British geologist John Beaumont had miners construct a rope ladder in 1676 so that they could more easily access the Great Chamber for mining. The report sounds like exploration was done without needing further assistance, suggesting that rigid ladders were used. In 1717, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort revisited Σπήλαιο της Αντιπάρου, using ladders of an unspecified kind. In 1760, British coal miners John Rathbone, Abraham Scott and William Bryant descended Pen Park Hole, with Alexander Catcott descending the first part. They probably used ladders, but the method is not recorded. Further exploration took place during the next few decades. In 1765, British miners were described as using stemples as ladders with very widely spaced rungs, manually climbing the steples with hands and feet. It is not known when this practice started, but it is likely to be very old, and is one of the methods thought to have been used in Peak Cavern in places like Stemple Highway and Leviathan, as much as 80 metres off the floor.
Historically, use of rope ladders was the main way for cavers to descend and ascend pitches, and wire ladders are still regularly used in cases where a cave has just a couple of minor pitches, but they have been largely replaced by SRT in potholes. They partially took over from the earlier use of handlines and winches on pitches, but did not replace them completely. Ladders were originally handmade from knotted hemp rope and wooden rungs, and during the early era of their use, they were often made specifically for an individual caving project since they did not last very long. As far as sport caving is concerned, Grotte des Demoiselles in France was explored using an 18-20 metre rope ladder modelled on sailing ladders, by Benoît-Joseph Marsollier and two others in 1780, descending a 15 metre pitch. This was repeated with better rungs made from iron. French researcher Jean Marie Amelin used wooden rungs in 1821, to reduce the weight, used in the same cave. Spanish caver M. Sola used a rope ladder with wooden rungs in Les Coves de Montserrat in 1825. In the 1830s and 1840s, a rigid wooden ladder was used at Dr. Bannister's Handbasin in Long Churn Cave in Britain, for tourists to use on guided wild cave tours. In 1835, Croatian school supervisor Julije Fras wrote that locals from Petrovo previously used a 1.5 metre wooden ladder to obtain water from Barić's Cave, which he also visited. In 1838, Gorin's Dome was discovered in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA, by Franklin Gorin and Stephen Bishop. Reaching it required ascending a ladder (therefore presumably a rigid ladder, not a rope ladder), which was still in use in 1866. They made extensive use of rigid ladders during exploration, lowering a rigid ladder down a pitch to descend it, and using a rigid ladder as a bridge to cross a pitch, finding Mammoth Dome via an ascent in 1840. In 1839-1840, Italian/Austrian mining engineer Antonio Federico Lindner had miners from Idrija blast open several narrow shafts of Grotta di Trebiciano (then the Austrian Empire, now Italy), installing wooden platforms separated by rigid wooden ladders, as they would have done while mining. At 250 metres depth, the miners discovered a new 30 metre pitch, which they descended without Antonio Federico Lindner using rope ladders with wooden rungs, setting a new depth record of 329 metres in 1840. Propast Macocha (Macocha Abyss) in the Czech Republic was explored using "folding" ladders, which could be joined together to reach the required 60 metres length, by Eduard Hanke von Hankenstein in 1856. The exact design is not known, but it is likely to have been a rope ladder, since the 45 kg weight is about right.
In 1870, British cavers John Birkbeck, William Metcalfe, William Boyd Dawkins and a party of seven other men and three women descended Alum Pot using a winch, installing ladders (thought to be rigid wooden ladders, but this is not recorded) on the lower pitches. American showcaves started having rope ladders installed for tourists, but it is not recorded whether these were used during actual caving activities. Kačna Jama, then in the Austrian Empire, now Slovenia, was explored by Austrian Anton Hanke, and Slovenians Gregor Žiberna-Tentava, Valentin Rešaver and Jožef Rebec in 1880-1891. They used fixed ladders for part of the descent. Rope ladders were installed for tourists in Cave Of The Winds, Colorado, USA, possibly as early as 1881. A "ladder" made from a tree trunk with branch stumps to use as steps was used in 1883 by William McCardell, Tom McCardell and Frank McCabe to explore Banf Cave hot springs, Canada. Rope ladders were then installed in Lehman Caves in Nevada, USA, for tourists to use in 1885, but that is not how the cave was originally explored. The use of rope ladders for cave exploration was popularised by French caver Édouard-Alfred Martel, whose first use of them was in Abîme de Bramabiau in southern France in 1888. He subsequently explored many other caves using rope ladders, such as the Gouffre de Padirac in 1889, as well as some using rigid wooden ladders. He was also one of the first to use a wire trace for attaching a ladder, but the date of that is not known. Between 1889 and 1892, he used a ladder to provide something to hold while suspended from a winch, to stop himself from spinning around.
Wire ladders were first used in Alum Pot in Britain by Harold Dawson in 1894, but these seemed overly heavy, as one person could only carry a 4 metre length, and they were then clipped together with dog/trigger clips. The rungs are not stated, but may have been wood or steel. However, most cavers still used hemp and later nylon ladders for the next 65 years. Édouard-Alfred Martel used a rope ladder to descend Britain's famous Gaping Gill in 1895. During the descent, the ladder had not been long enough, and he had to manually climb a rope for the top 20 metres! British caver Edward Calvert had been planning a descent of Gaping Gill using rope ladders in 1895, but missed out on the glory due to delays. The Yorkshire Rambler's Club descended Long Kin West in 1896 and Rowten Pot in 1897 using rope ladders. At that time, some ladders were made with wooden rungs, and some were made with rope rungs, which were lighter, but trapped the feet more. Some had occasional wooden rungs with rope rungs in between. Rope rungs very quickly lost favour, and wood was almost exclusively used. Cavers had developed the semi-standard climbing calls during these years. Many clubs started to build ladders that could be used by their members, and the ladders would survive enough trips for that to be worthwhile. American teenager James Larkin "Jim" White used a ladder that he made from rope, fence wire and local shrubs to explore Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, USA in 1898, an event which he subsequently repeated with a Mexican teenager known as "Muchacho". New explorations in the cave used rope ladders in 1924. Ladder usage started to spread to other British caving regions, such as Mendip by 1903. Some of the ladders used in Britain had metal rungs by 1910. Wired aluminium ladders were used by Vladimír Brandstätter in Propast Macocha-Punkevní Jeskyně (Punkva Caves) in 1924, and since it was a showcave at that point, they are likely to have been very thick cables and rungs.
Robert de Joly invented the Galet, a device to push rope ladders away from rub points to avoid damage to the hemp, in France in the 1920s. French cavers typically used naturals to attach ladders, but in 1924, French caver Henri More and members of the French mountaineering/caving club Les Jarrets d'Acier used a log cut from a tree trunk as an anchor. They then used pitons somewhere between 1924 and 1932. Hemp ladders were painfully heavy, about 1 kg per metre. The hemp used in rope ladders absorbed water, and became very heavy, and would occasionally snap without warning (though this did improve over time). Italians had experimented with using wire ladders with C-links later called the "Italian link", some time before 1930. The ladders were heavy due to being made from thick cables and rungs that were far stronger than they needed to be. The C-links were then used by other cavers. Using aircraft cables, and metal inspired by World War I incendiary munitions (La Spéléologie, Robert de Joly, 1947), Robert de Joly invented the electron ladder in France in 1930, and they weighed just 40-100 grams per metre (modern ones are 60-120 grams per metre). This is very similar to the weight of a 10 mm nylon rope, but ropes soak up water. A ladder still needed a lifeline, potentially twice as long as the ladder, so electron ladders and nylon ropes would be about a third of the weight of a traditional hemp rope ladder, or a fifth the weight of a hemp rope ladder and lifeline (though it would be another 12 years before nylon would be used to make ropes). However, cavers took a long time to trust electron ladders due to how thin they looked and how easily they moved around due to the lack of weight, so their first use in Britain was in 1943 (Forty Foot Pot, Swildon's Hole, by the Bristol Exploration Club). It is also worth noting that even 3 mm steel wire was stronger than the thin mountaineering ropes that were used to make rope ladders at that time, though wooden rungs would typically be stronger than the rungs of an electron ladder. When beech rungs were tested on a newly built wooden rope ladder in Britain's Ogof Ffynnon Ddu in about 2000 (yes, really), which were attached to a rope using a nail driven through the rung and rope, they held 300-400 kg without breaking or slipping, but their actual strength is not known and could have been higher. With electron ladders, the lack of weight meant that cavers had to learn a completely new climbing technique, hugging the ladder as we still do today. The name comes from the Elektronmetall alloy that the rungs were made of, which was manufactured by the Brittish company Magnesium Elektron. The first British electron ladders were built by Harry Stanbury of the Bristol Exploration Club in 1943.
In 1944, French caver Henry P. Guérin described small ladders called etriers being used as footholds, and showed how to construct etriers from knotted handlines, using loop knots. He also stated that a caver called Andrault had just made a rope ladder using silk parachute cord for the ropes. After World War II, ladder widths, which had previously been variable but slowly decreasing, reached their now common width of 20 cm. Electron ladders were used for small, lightweight expeditions in 1946, while cavers spent the next 20 years refining the design of how the rungs were attached to the cables. Rope ladders were still used more than all other approaches during the 1950s, often still made of hemp (in spite of the existence of nylon rope). Rungs may be round (which could rotate - nightmare) or square (which stayed still). By 1952, American cavers from the southeastern USA were switching to electron ladders, but American cavers still actively used rope ladders. It was not until the 1960s that electron ladders became commonly used in Britain, mainly because they could easily fit in a car and be taken underground by relatively small groups, which had become more common due to an increase in car ownership and the construction of motorways. Most of these were made by individual clubs, not companies, and cavers had experimented with many different ways to attach the rungs. That attachment was often the weakest part of the ladder, and sometimes would slip during use. The use of spits started in France in 1961, after they were recommended for ladders by Claude Pommier, and they became widespread in France after 1965. This allowed pitches to have more conveniently placed anchors, and to be broken into shorter hangs, reducing the amount of damage that they would get at rub points. They became widely used in France after 1965. The club-made ladders approach continued in Britain until the early 1980s, after which it became normal to purchase properly made commercial ones, which had much more reliable rungs.
This history section only covers ladders. This article also has a detailed history of many of the other devices and techniques that are used for vertical caving.
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