Vertical caving terminology and methods > Rigging methods and equipment
A way to make a Y-hang belay safer when using a sling. Without a sliding X, a carabiner would be clipped directly into both strands of the sling. If an anchor fails, the carabiner can slide off the end of the sling, causing the load to fall. Neither anchor is redundant. It would be possible to clip into just one strand of the sling, leaving the other to pull tight between the anchors, but this means the sling is only half as strong (but still as strong as the sling itself, rather than being doubled), and increases the force on the anchors in a similar way to a pull-through. With a sliding X, one of the strands of the sling is twisted around so that it passes in the opposite direction through the carabiner. If an anchor fails, the carabiner slides to the end of the sling, but then gets caught with the sling wrapped twice through it. While this is a very good safety measure, and it allows the carabiner to naturally slide into a position where the load is equally shared between the anchors, it comes with a very significant drawback. When the carabiner slams into the end of the sling, it generates a very large shock load, depending on the fall factor. This arrangement is rarely used in caving, but if it is used, it might be seen with a ladder. Since a ladder provides absolutely no shock absorption, the shock would almost certainly break the ladder, and cause the caver to become detached from it. It might even break the sling, depending on what load is being held. Therefore the sliding X would not actually help to make anything safer in many cases. It is much better to use a knot to attach the load to the sling since the load balancing aspect of the sliding X is almost never important enough to be needed. The most common knot would be a lark's foot. However, knots do not work very well in Dyneema slings, as they can still slowly slide off the end of the sling in the case of a failed anchor. As a result, a variation of the sliding X might be used, tying a lark's foot or clove hitch around the carabiner in addition to the sliding X, to create the lark's X or clove X. These tend to grip much better with Dyneema slings, but these approaches are almost never seen in caving. They still dramatically reduce the strength of a Dyneema sling, just like a basic lark's foot would have done.
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