Vertical caving terminology and methods > Rigging methods and equipment
Thin rope/cord which is passed through the anchors or carabiners which are set up for a pull-through at the pitch head. The rope/cord is looped all the way down to the base of the pitch, where it usually passes through another pair of anchors to prevent it from tangling. This is used to pull a rope up to the pitch head from the pitch base, to allow access to an aven without having to leave a fixed rope in place. One common approach is to attach the rope to the anchors at the pitch base, and treating the top anchors like a pulley while using the other end of the rope for prusiking and abseiling (with the associated risk of abseiling on the wrong side). This method causes a lot of wear to the anchors at the top, due to the movement of the rope, but is typically used when there is only a single anchor at the top with a very large ring. Alternatively, the end of the down rope can be whipped or tied to the pull-up cord, using a knot small enough to pass through the anchors or carabiners at the pitch head. The end of the rope may be prepared for this purpose by stitching a short length of thin cord to the end, so that it can be tied with a smaller knot. The rope is set up as a standard pull-through with the carabiner clipped around the pull-up cord returning from the pitch head. As the tail of the rope descends, it will feed through the carabiner, leaving the rope rigged as a standard pull-through. Alternatively, the rope can be set up with a large knot tied half way down it, and the pull-up cord can be pulled until the tail reaches the pitch base, and the knot reaches the anchors at the top. The knot then supports the load simply by being unable to pass through the anchor. For this method to work, you must know the size of the anchors at the top, so that the knot can be made suitably large. Alternatively the knot (for either of the previous two approaches) can be tied at the end of the rope instead of the middle, and the knot can also be tied to the pull-up cord when it reaches it. This allows the shortest of all rope configurations to be used, where the rope is as long as the pitch instead of double.
The idea behind pull-up cords had existed for centuries. Maghrebi traveller Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battutah visited Alexandria, Egypt, in 1326. He recounted the story of how a (presumably Mamluk) archer had previously used a bow an arrow to drag a pull-up cord over Pompey's Pillar, and used it to pull up a rope which he could then use to climb the pillar. It is not known when this actually took place, but it will have been some time before that year. When grappling hooks were to be thrown up to high platform (such as the walls of a castle), a thin cord could be looped through a hole in the grappling hook, which would be light enough to allow the grappling hook to be thrown. A rope would be attached to one end of the cord. When the grappling hook had hooked onto something, the other end of the thin cord could be pulled, which pulled the rope up through the hole in the grappling hook, so the rope could be used as a rope climb or for prusiking. This approach was described in 1719 by Gaspard II Grollier de Servières, as something that had been discussed by Nicolas Grollier de Servières at some point either during his military career or his retirement, between 1610 and 1689. French artist Francois Sebastien Fauvel used a kite to install a pull-up cord on Pompey's Pillar in Egypt in 1789, which was used to pull up a ladder, for the purpose of adding graffiti. This was repeated in 1798 by sailors, but instead of using a ladder, they pulled up a rope for hauling, which was used to raise a sailor, French architects Charles Norry, André Dutertre, Jean Constantin Protain and Jean-Baptiste Lepère, and several members of the Commission of Arts. Pulling up ropes with thin cords has been used in many other contexts too.
The first use of pull-up cords for caving is not known, but it would originally have been for ladders, so that a ladder could be taken through the cave, and hauled back up to the pitch head using ropes, so that only a single ladder was needed. The first version of this was used by French caver Édouard-Alfred Martel in 1892 in Aven de Vigne Close, and is described in the British publication Encyclopaedia of Sport, 1898, where if a ladder was not long enough to reach the bottom of a pitch, cavers could descend to a ledge, stop on the ledge, and then someone at the pitch head could lower the ladder further down on a rope so that the ladder could be rigged from there instead, allowing the team to descend further. With this approach, a caver would be left at each ledge, to reattach the ladder when it was pulled up. Pierre Chevalier, Hélène Guillemin and François Guillemin started using pull-up cords for ladders just like a normal pull-up cord pulled through a carabiner or metal ring at the top of the pitch, in the Dent de Crolles system near Grenoble in France in 1935, without needing a person at the top. This approach was used for many years afterwards. French caver Henry P. Guérin described a maypole in 1944 which had a pull-up cord that could be used to pull up a ladder, without needing a person at the top, by attaching the rope at the bottom, just like a normal pull-up cord. Pull-up cords were used with a pulley at the top starting from 1946 by French cavers Pierre Chevalier and others in the Dent de Crolles system. Pull-up cords for ropes were first used by French caver Daniel Martinez in 1972.
This history section only covers pull-up cords. 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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