Vertical caving terminology and methods > Knots > Common knots
Useful for emergencies
Several different types of friction hitch which can be used instead of an ascender, and are commonly referred to as prusik knots. The klemheist knot (also confusingly known as the French Machard knot, despite not being French, and not being created by Serge Machard) is often used, and the classic Prusik knot is still regularly recommended, in spite of its problems. Both of those are made from a lark's foot with additional turns, but differ in which side of the knot the tails come from. Both can be tied with more turns or fewer turns, depending on how much grip is needed, and this can be used to set the working load limit of the knot. The Prusik knot can be frustratingly hard to untie after loading, and is less convenient for prusiking as a result, since it would need to be loosened for every movement. This problem gets much worse as more turns are added, and modern kernmantel nylon ropes normally require more turns than hawser laid and hemp ropes. In spite of there being several knots that perform better, it is still widely recommended by climbers, and appears in virtually all literature that discusses prusiking with friction hitches.
The Gérard hitch is a variation of the Prusik knot, where the carabiner is clipped into the loop at the ends of the knot rather than the middle, and is generally now only tied by mistake, but was the first one used for prusiking, and is slightly easier to tie. The Hedden knot is the original variation of the klemheist knot, and grips much better with only minimal turns. The Schwabisch hitch is an asymmetric variation of the Prusik knot, where one side of the knot has more turns than the other. The Bachmann knot does not grip as well on muddy ropes. The autoblock knot (also known as the Machard knot or French prusik knot, but that confuses it with the klemheist knot) slips more easily when accidentally touched even when loaded, and is intended to add more friction to a descender, not to be trusted for prusiking. Most of these knots are tied by threading a prusik loop around the main rope.
The Schwabisch hitch, Distel hitch, Valdôtain tresse and Valdôtain tresse XT are made from a tether instead of a prusik loop, typically connected using a pair of poacher's knots or eye splices, with both ends clipped to the same carabiner. The Distel, Valdôtain tresse and Valdôtain tresse XT knots are very rarely used, with the Valdôtain tresse XT needing a slightly longer cord, and significantly more rope than the other two. All three are based on the rolling hitch, with additional turns to provide a better grip. The Valdôtain Tresse and Valdôtain Tresse XT may need more wraps depending on the tether being used, and are often used in combination with a pulley to help push up the knot.
The Blake's hitch is made from a tether instead of a prusik loop, and is very unusual, because it can be tied with a tether that is the same thickness as the rope it is tied around. It is primarily used for doubled rope technique, where it only needs to hold about half the load it would do with regular prusiking, so the grip requirements are lower. With very flexible ropes, it is normally tied with four turns, and the tail is passed around the front of the tether, around the back of the rope, and fed up through the bottom 2 turns of the knot, known as a "4/2" arrangement. However, for stiffer ropes, such as the ones used for SRT, it usually requires more turns, and the tail needs to be fed through more of them, such as a "5/3" arrangement, with the knot being very tightly set before and during use. It relies on the tether being flexible enough to be able to bend in a circle of its own diameter, using just simple finger strength, and if the rope cannot turn a tight enough bend, then the knot will not grip enough. With most caving SRT ropes, it barely manages to get enough grip to be used for prusiking. The knot can slip untied, so a long tail is used, and must be tied with an additional knot that cannot slip back through the main knot, such as a double overhand knot. This additional knot also must be large enough to prevent the tail from passing through the loop running down the outside of the Blake's hitch, as even though that would cause it to pass through more turns, the knot does not grip unless the tail passes behind the main rope. Pulling on the tail can make it easier to slide up the rope. Because of its limitations, the main potential use of this knot in caving would be for some improvised rescue techniques.
The rolling hitch, Magnus hitch, steeplejack's hitch, locking hitch and helical knot are made from a tether instead of a prusik loop, with only a single end being loaded. None of these are likely to be actively used for prusiking now, and are mentioned here only because they played a part in the development of the more popular knots, or because they were historically used instead of the more common knots. However, the helical knot may see some rare use with prusiking in caves for historical fun, particularly in the southeastern USA, and the rolling hitch may sometimes be seen as the tautline hitch with tent guy ropes. The rolling hitch is just a clove hitch with an extra turn on one side. The Magnus hitch is a variation of the rolling hitch where the direction of the top turn is reversed, and is also a lark's foot with an extra turn on one side. The steeplejack's hitch is a variation of the rolling hitch with an extra turn. The helical knot is a more simple idea, relying on twisting the prusik tether around the main rope repeatedly, with additional turns increasing the friction. The tail is then tied to the loaded side of the knot to form a loop, typically using a bowline or eskimo bowline for caving, but a clove hitch might be seen in older publications. It is very common to add an overhand knot or figure of 8 knot in the tail of the bowline, to make it less likely to accidentally capsize, but this is definitely not as safe as using a stopped bowline. The helical knot is more sensitive to the knot being too lose or too tight, with it either gripping too tightly to allow easy motion, or not gripping enough to be used.
Almost all of these knots are directional, in that they are designed to be used only with a specific direction pointing up the rope. The exceptions are the Prusik knot, the Gérard hitch, the autoblock knot and the helical knot, which can be used equally in both directions. The Hedden knot and klemheist knot are inverted versions of each other, with the Hedden knot rarely neading more than two turns, and the klemheist often needing twice as many. For some reason, the weaker one became more popular, and people often incorrectly claim that the klemheist is weaker when pulled in the wrong direction. When using a hawser laid rope, many of the knots perform better when their turns match the twist direction of the main rope, and this is particularly significant with the helical knot.
Prior to the Gérard hitch, there were numerous hitches used by sailors, arborists and well diggers, such as the rolling hitch by 1794 and a variation called the Magnus hitch soon afterwards, which were used to secure objects to a cable, rope or mast, rather than actively prusik up it. Initially, the rolling hitch was also called the Magnus hitch until 1841, when the two names were separated, and the rolling hitch earned its own name (which had previously been used for a completely different knot, just to add to the confusion). Mountaineers were using friction hitches to secure ropes to an axe handle, described by British mountaineer Clinton Thomas Dent in 1892 in the Mountaineering magazine as a double clove hitch (though the exact knot is not known). They also used the rolling hitch in 1906, described by British mountaineer Lionel F. West as a way to connect ropes. However, neither of them were recognised as useful for prusiking. The classic Prusik knot and Hedden/klemheist knots were invented long ago by sailors who used them to raise a spar (wooden pole), depicted by American sailor Clifford Warren Ashley in The Ashley Book Of Knots (#1763 and #1762). The Autoblock knot was originally a well digger's hitch used to secure a hook to a pole (#505). It is not known exactly when each of these knots was invented, since the research for that book took place between 1933 and 1944, but the knots will have been in very common use already by the time they were researched, and the use of sailing knots will have come from the author's own time as a sailor, which began in 1904.
It is safe to assume that the Prusik knot was in use by sailors long before 1931, not least because Clifford Warren Ashley did not call it by that name or mention it in reference to mountaineering, showing that use of that knot within sailing had not originated with Karl Prusik. In addition, he stated that its purpose was for hoisting spars for sailing in particular, which was a dying art by then, as commercial and naval shipping had already been largely replaced by mechanical engines, and even hybrid sailing ships were being replaced with entirely steam powered vessels by the 1930s. (The last major cargo sailing ships to be built were the København and Magdalene Vinnen II/Sedov from 1921, though the major cargo sailing ships Pamir and Passat last sailed in 1957, and the smaller cargo sailing ship Omega sailed in 1958. Much smaller sailing ships are still made as pleasure craft or cargo carriers such as Indonesian pinisi.) However, Clifford Warren Ashley did not mention it in his minimalistic articles called The Sailor And His Knots from 1925 (which showed only a couple of hitches), so possibly he had not seen anyone using it in Massachusetts at that time, or did not think it was important enough to include. It will have originated as a lark's foot, which was used to attach a strop/strap or bale sling (a sling used by sailors) to a wooden mast or spar. This is always depicted as just a lark's foot in every manual I could find, starting with British naval manuals from 1860 and American manuals a few years later, but from as early as 1853, the text describing strops states that two or more turns could be used if needed for extra grip when attaching it to a rope with other hitches, implying that the idea of adding extra turns to a lark's foot might also be used if needed, creating the Prusik knot. Almost all sailing books from the 1800s and early 1900s simply copy each other's text and graphics, showing the subset of knots the British navy taught to new recruits. Very few had new content based on what was actually being used by sailors at that time and location, so they show only a fraction of the knots that sailors were actually using. As a result, it is impossible to know when the Prusik knot started being used by sailors. It might be that Clifford Warren Ashley was the first to depict it, but either way, it is likely to have been in use for many decades, possibly since the 1850s or even earlier. The vast majority of his 96 sailing knot references are from before 1931, and neither of the later ones show it, so it is extremely likely that he learned about it from a much older source. I have not been able to work out which one it came from, despite searching through the majority of them (a few of the old books cannot be searched, unfortunately). "What ancient hairy tar, how many centuries ago, was author of the artifice we do not seem to know." - Alan Patrick Herbert, The Bowline, 1939 (but that line could just as easily have been about the Prusik knot).
The Gérard hitch was created by French mountaineer E. Gérard and published in 1928 in French publication La Montagne, with more information later in the same year relating to footloops and glacier rescue, with the intention of it being used to ascend ropes, the first knot created for that purpose. Perhaps we should call it gérarding rather than prusiking, or even agripping, since mechanical ascenders came first. It is highly likely that he had also experimented with the Prusik knot variation, but preferred his own one. It is worth noting that almost every publication I could find that discusses this hitch incorrectly says that it was announced in the 1922 edition of La Montagne, but it was definitely the 1928 edition. It was translated into English in the Alpine Journal in 1929, as part of E. R. Blanchet's article "The Spare Rope In Theory And Practice". The Austrian mountaineering journal Österreichische Alpenzeitung described it in an article by W. F. in December of 1929, and referenced the Alpine Journal translation. Astrian mountaineer Karl Prusik would have read that journal, since he was a prominent member of the Österreichischer Alpenklub that published it (later the vice president of it), and which distributed both La Montagne and the Alpine Journal to its members, and it can be safely concluded that he knew about it. The classic Prusik knot was supposedly independently reinvented by Karl Prusik in 1931, inspired by the lark's foot which he had used to mend guitar strings in the World War I trenches. However, since it is basically the same as a Gérard hitch, with the load placed on the other end of the same structure, his invention was probably also heavily influenced by E. Gérard's article, though he completely failed to credit anyone, and significant parts of his article could almost be considered plagiarism. At the time, his clubs were openly racist, having been early adopters of what would later become Nazi ideals since 1921 (Karl Prusik himself served as a Nazi captain), and it is extremely likely that they would not have wanted someone from France to get the credit for developing something that they would end up using. Unlike the sailors who had normally pulled the knot directly away from the spar it was tied to, he used it to pull sideways, in line with the rope that it was tied to (this hardly counts as an innovation, and it is likely that sailors also pulled it this way, as books show they would sometimes do so with a lark's foot too). His name has since become an adjective and a verb, applied to all methods of ascending ropes, as well as the loops used to make the knots. His version of the knot has one fewer turn than is generally used now, and was more prone to slipping. According to his climbing partner Wolf Kitterle, he started work on it in the late 1920s, "he guessed 1928", and this is completely consistent with him having learned the technique from E. Gérard. These knots were then used as the main method of prusiking, even though mechanical ascenders already existed, until the first Jümar was released in 1958.
Some time before 1936, American arborists were using the rolling hitch and a variation with an extra turn, which they called a locking hitch, for storing their climbing progress. The rolling hitch also gets called a tautline hitch when it is tied back to its own rope, and American arborist Karl Kuemmerling was apparently using the tautline hitch for this purpose in the 1930s, probably as early as 1932, when he developed a sit harness. In 1938, French caver Pierre Chevalier used the Prusik knot to prusik up a pitch in the Dent de Crolles system after a ladder failed to pull up correctly, which is the first known use of a friction hitch underground. By 1944, American steeplejack Laurie Young showed that they were also using a variation of the rolling hitch called a steeplejack's hitch. American arborists were also using the prusik knot by that year, but pulling on one side of it instead of using both sides at once. This seems to be an independent invention, derived from the locking hitch. By 1952, American cavers Bob Handley and Charlie Fort had also used Prusik knots in caves. The Bachman knot was invented by Austrian Franz Bachmann in 1952. In 1955, British caver W. H. Little created the Slipgrip, a belay device for self belaying, which relied on a simple helical friction hitch. This was very similar to a well digger's hitch (#1760) described in 1944 by American sailor Clifford Warren Ashley, but using a splice instead of its final clove hitch. American caver Chet Hedden reinvented the Hedden knot and klemheist knot (the same knot pulled in opposite directions) in 1959, and decided that the Hedden knot direction was better because that direction did not jam, and resulted in a much more natural direction for the tails to be pulled. After it was announced to cavers in 1959 and climbers in 1960, others chose to use it upside down, in the klemheist direction, even though it was weaker in that direction, and often needed more turns. The inverted Hedden knot was named the klemheist knot in 1973 in Bill March's Modern Rope Techniques, and people soon forgot that it was much better when used in the Hedden knot direction.
American caver Clarence Cook is credited with inventing the helical knot (later known as the Penberthy hitch after Larry Penberthy reinvented it in 1968) in 1961, but it is the same basic knot as the Slipgrip used 6 years previously, relying on a bowline to tie the ends together instead of a splice. The autoblock knot was reinvented in France in 1961 by Serge Machard, which happened to be an adaptation of the inverted Hedden knot. At the time, it is likely that he did not know about the existence of the Hedden knot. Because of their similarities, and because they both started to be used for mountaineering at around the same time, the name Machard was used for both the autoblock and klemheist knots in French, and because of that, many people mistakenly assumed that Serge Machard invented the klemheist knot too.
Arborists and cavers then made numerous little variations of the rolling hitch, often adding turns and tucking the tail through various parts of the knot. The Schwabisch hitch was announced as a new invention by Bernd Strasser in Germany in 1998 for arboriculture, but it is a variation of the Prusik knot that had actually been in use since the 1970s, and is also a variation of the much older Magnus hitch. The Blake's hitch was created in 1981 by Austrian mountaineer Heinz Prohaska, when it was announced to mountaineers, and announced to cavers in Nylon Highway in 1990. However, when it was then used and described by arborist Jason Blake in 1994, it was renamed by arborists to the Blake's hitch, and the incorrect name has now become its common name. (Heinz Prohaska is also the author of the 1997 article that exposed Karl Prusik's deception, so it is almost insultingly ironic that he would be deprived of recognition over his own invention. A sarcastic bravo, arborists.) The Valdôtain tresse was invented some time before 1994 in Aosta, Italy, for use with Alpine search and rescue. The Distel hitch was created from a mis-tied Schwabisch hitch. As might be expected, several variations of each of these knots were produced, often with someone's name or initials attached to them. And there are numerous other knots that are not related to any of these, many of which appeared and disappeared from use during the days before Jümars became available.
This history section only covers the Prusik knot and other friction hitches. This article also has a detailed history of many of the other devices and techniques that are used for vertical caving.
<< Italian hitch, Munter hitch, HMS, crossing hitch, super Italian hitch, super Munter hitch | Alpine clutch ("Garda hitch" in USA) >>
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.