A balance of performance and safety
Lead rope soloing gets increasingly complicated as the climbing gets harder. A "Redpoint Rope Soloing" approach means you try to send the free climbing, managing the self-belay with one hand, while making difficult free-climbing moves. (This differs from solo aid climbing where you always have two hands to manage both the primary belay system and any backups).
On cutting-edge ascents (think a 450m wall of 5.13d) professional climbers sometimes accept compromises to make hard free climbing possible. But we want to encourage the lead solo systems to maintain as much redundancy as possible.
Yes, we are referring to Siebe Vanhees’ recent alpine ascent, where his lead rope solo setup was optimized heavily around keeping the system streamlined and minimizing anything that could interfere with hard climbing moves. If you are a lead solo systems geek like us, it probably caught your attention for the lack of backup.
He uses a single progress-capturing pulley (Spoc) for a continuous cache loop system. This one-way pulley holds the majority of the rope weight, creating a small, lighter-weight loop of rope to auto-feed through the device. During a fall, the expectation is that the curved rope path through the primary belay device (an Edelrid pinch, very similar to a GriGri) will cause enough friction to engage the cam, which then grabs the rope.
But there are known scenarios where the rope curve through the device feeds too smoothly during a fall, and the device engages late (or never engages). To protect from this failure mode, there would need to be backup knots along the free rope to jam into the device.
But for Siebe's system, there are no backup knots. There is only a small amount of hope that the rope path through the Spoc might engage the cam by way of brake-strand friction. But pulleys are designed to feed rope with very little friction, so it is not a sure bet. That makes for a very clean, high-performance system. It also removes important redundancy.
We want to be clear: we’re not criticizing Siebe’s ascent. Climbing 450m of 5.13d solo is an incredible achievement, and configuring a rope solo system that allows you to climb at that level requires a tremendous amount of experience and judgment.
But there’s an important distinction between a system optimized for a professional climber pushing the limits and a system we’d recommend to the average climber. For most people, we think it’s worth building as much redundancy into an LRS system as reasonably possible.
Lead rope soloing is already a fringe use of climbing equipment. Even a well-designed system isn’t going to behave as smoothly as a partnered belay, and there are failure modes and awkward situations that simply don’t exist with a human belayer.
Can the cache loop management be a backup?
Managing the size of that cache loop is the key to an autofeeding device while climbing upwards. This is a layer of gear separate from the primary belay device, so why can't this gear create a backup?
My favorite way to manage the cache loop is to pre-cache multiple loops of rope onto my harness before I begin climbing. The loops are racked with knots, which serve double duty in holding the rope in place and adding a backup to the system. Clove hitches work well for racking the rope and can be undone with one hand while climbing. But the downside of pre-caching is that you climb the pitch with multiple rope loops hanging off your harness (shown well in this video). This adds tangle risk and extra weight - this is likely why Siebe opted for the single cache loop, which he managed by pulling rope through while climbing.
There are some continuous-cache management options that create a backup if the primary device does not engage. The two worth noting are the Freebell and the Fuse Jammer. But both have serious drawbacks in weight, cost, and rope drag. When trying to climb 5.13+, these devices would make the climbing harder. I don't knock Siebe for his sleek setup (though I would encourage him to try pre-caching loops, as undesirable as those harness loops may seem!).
Read more about these devices in a past Deep Dive.
How much backup is enough?
Pete Whittaker made some similar no-backup compromises during his 2016 Freerider in a Day lead solo. Since then, the LRS community’s understanding of system redundancy and safer configurations has continued to evolve.
That doesn’t mean there’s now one universally correct LRS setup. Different systems have different tradeoffs, and different climbers have different priorities. Lead solo climbing is still an off-label use
Rather than prescribing a single best option, we'd like to leave you with questions to reflect on.
- How much redundancy are you willing to add before it starts interfering with autofeeding? This could be dangerous if your system stops feeding mid-runout.
- When does a backup make the system meaningfully safer, and when does it simply add another piece of gear to manage? (think being close to the ground, or above a ledge)
- How robust is your primary belay device and rope combination? Be sure to consider the rope being used, and how this factors into the catch reliability of the device.
Our preference is to build the safest system we can, accept that it might add a grade to the free climbing difficulty, and recognize that lead rope soloing itself remains inherently committing and carries significant risk.
