To Rappel or Not to Rappel

Editor’s note: Please see references for the data mentioned in this article. We offer our opinions based on this data, not data-driven conclusions. We recommend further reading for better understanding of risk.

By now, everyone is probably familiar with the change of lowering/rappelling standards. Indeed, in the past, rappelling was the standard method to clean/descend routes. The main reasoning for this was because it put less wear on the fixed anchors, preserving them for other climbers in the future. Later, the standard became lowering instead. The argument was that lowering is safer, and it is worth changing fixed gear more often if it means saving lives.

As with everything in this sport, there is still plenty of debate, and it is not as cut-and-dry as you might think. For example, when you rappel, you only statically load the rope, so not only does it save you wear on the rope and anchors, it also reduces the risk of cutting your rope on a sharp edge (imagine running a rope over a blade’s edge vs resting it there). However, when lowering, you are technically never off belay, so you have extra redundancies, not to mention you have less room for human error (like making a grilled cheese vs making risotto). All of that being said, you still are left with questions: who will pay/install new anchors? are climbers becoming “dumber” or more complacent? what is personal assumption of risk, and what should we decide as a collective is too dangerous?

I don’t think anyone knows the absolute truth and absolute safest practices, because I don’t think these absolutes exist in climbing. Too much is situational. Even more, it is very hard to find accurate and details statistics on rock climbing accidents. A lot of claims we hear are based on personal accounts or rumors, but finding data to back up these claims has proven difficult. Additionally, with fatalities in particular, if there is no one alive to tell you what happened, it can be hard to piece together what went wrong. All of that being said, I can still try my best to take a stab at what dangers we really face out there.

There is a paper¹ released in 1990 about climbing incidents in Grand Teton National Park. Obviously, it is a bit dated and localized, but perhaps it can give us a good baseline. They found that most incidents were related to traversing snow and climbing rock. Indeed, of 108 incidents between 1981-1986, only three were rappelling accidents. However, while all other accidents types had varying amounts of human error, they found that the rappelling accidents were all caused by human error. Two accidents were due anchor failure, and one was regarding rappelling off the end of a rope. In other words, had these parties chosen better anchors and tied stopper knots, the accidents could have been prevented. Of the 23 fatal accidents, rappelling accounted for two. The others were mostly related to snow/ice and falls. The types of human errors in these fatal accidents were largely ice-related or poor judgement related (e.g., ignored warnings, bad pro, off-route/lost), and of course the two types of rappelling failures discussed previously. Furthermore, none of the accidents were a result of equipment failing with proper usage. Hence, we can conclude from this paper that the main danger of rappelling is the human aspect, as there was no case of proper gear failing and the rappelling incidents were all caused by errors in judgment. Since then, climbing gear has only improved in quality, so you would think that the rappelling incidents today would have the same causes as back then.

In a slightly newer paper² from 2012, we can look at climbing accidents in Boulder County, CO, which includes incidents/rescues from 1998-2011. Although still localized, this paper offers more data, especially closer to the present. Of the 190 technical, roped climbing incidents, the majority were due to (in order) lead falls, belaying, and getting lost/stranded. In fact, there were 13 lowering off incidents and 9 rappelling off incidents. There were 10 cases of rappels getting stuck. It isn’t clear what caused the rappelling accidents, but the accidents discussed in the paper were due to insufficient rope length and/or uneven ropes without a stopper knot. They reported 23 fatalities, which were largely free soloing and lead falls. There were three deaths from lowering, and no reported rappelling deaths. The causes they discussed of lowering incidents were belayers losing control and/or not having a long enough rope. It seems like the rappelling/lowering incidents were preventable from the cases discussed.

Clearly, we need more information, both in time and locality, to better understand the statistical danger of these practices. For today, this is all I have. It is up to each climber to decide what they deem safe or unsafe, but I will leave you with some parting thoughts. I think it is fairly clear that rappelling accidents are caused by human error. Anything that would cause a rappel to fail that is not human error (e.g., rock fall, bolt failure) would certainly cause a lower to fail. This means climbers are either uneducated, complacent, or out of practice. There are some routes that you must rappel off of. If more people never learn or don’t practice rappelling, I think we will see more accidents in cases where you must rappel. I also think that if we say that rappelling is just as dangerous as lowering, we might see more climbers get complacent and rush through their set up and forget simple things like stopper knots. It is not clear from the data which method is more dangerous, and at the end of the day, I’m not sure it matters. I think climbers are safest when they take their safety seriously, do what they are familiar with, and only explore into new territory when they have an experienced mentor. Everything should be treated as dangerous, because the entire sport is dangerous, and we need to remember that no single technique is 100% safe. These deaths are preventable, and the key is to find ways to help climbers maintain safe practices. It wasn’t the rock that failed, it was the humans, and that is a problem we can fix.

¹ Schussman LC, Lutz LJ, Shaw RR, Bohnn CR. The epidemiology of mountaineering and rock climbing accidents. Journal of Wilderness Medicine. 1990;1(4):235-248. doi:10.1580/0953-9859-1.4.235

² Lack DA, Sheets AL, Entin JM, Christenson DC. Rock Climbing Rescues: Causes, Injuries, and Trends in Boulder County, Colorado. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine. 2012;23(3):223-230. doi:10.1016/j.wem.2012.04.002