The Anchor Point

Ideas that hold up under load

Hey Reader

One of my underlying ideas about rescue is that you should:

I’ve used a human (meat) anchor for canyon rescue before. It’s not glamorous, but the patient doesn’t care how technical your rescue is. They just want out of their position of peril as quickly as possible.

So train with the simplest methods first, and get genuinely efficient at the skills you’re likely to use most often. Resist the urge to jump straight into the hardest, rarest scenarios; keep those in the training plan, but always at the end of the sequence.

The harder scenarios usually aren’t more technical: they need more coordination. Staying calm, reading the situation accurately, delegating to keep your span of control intact, making decisions that build momentum toward the right outcome: that separates a smooth rescue from a scrambled one, far more than any piece of gear does.

A progression inside a scenario

Take a canyoning scenario we train for: someone stuck in the water flow.

1. If I’ve got a releasable system and good comms, and I know the problem (clothing or hair caught in the device, a jammed abseil device), the first option is to lower them.
2. If instead they’ve got a foot stuck behind a rock, or gear snagged, lowering makes it worse. A quick changeover to a counterweight might free them enough to keep going or get lowered safely.
3. If neither lowering nor raising resolves it, the next step in the progression is abseiling down to physically assist them, or picking them off onto your own system.

Each step only works if you actually know what the problem is. Comms matter as much as the technique.

A progression inside a technique

Pulley systems are a good example of a skill that lends itself to a clean progression.

With four pulleys, you can move from a 3:1 simple, to a 3:1 with a change of direction, to a 5:1 simple, to a 9:1 compound, relatively easily, once you’ve built the muscle memory.

Knowing which one you’ll likely need, based on load, friction over the edge, and number of haulers, lets you stage your gear ahead of time instead of hunting for it mid-rescue.

In our canyon packs, that means a small prusik-minding pulley and two other small pulleys clipped inside the top of the pack with the pitch rope, plus rope grabs and carabiners on each person’s harness so any system can be built on the spot.

Get the simple version automatic first. The more complicated systems come easily once the fundamentals are second nature, and that’s what a progression is for.

If your team can talk through a pulley progression but fumbles when they actually have to build one under pressure, that’s a rehearsal problem, not a knowledge problem. It’s also an easy one to fix with the right hands-on session.

I run technical rigging and progression-based training for guides, instructors and teams; get in touch by replying to this email if that would help yours.

Grant