That was the scenario in my case but instead of retying and continuing the climb I chose to recover by attaching a lanyard to the tree, unweighting the Garda and come down.
the question posed to you is if you lose a Michoacan completely and the Garda catches you, then what do you do? You often mention that you could cut a Michoacan and you would be completely safe by the Garda hitch. I don’t disagree as I experience yesterday,and so the question is once that happens how do you get down. Assume you can’t retie or recover the hitch for whatever reason.
no rush, everyone is busy. Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks for keeping up with this thread.
Ok, so here's the situation: one friction hitch or the cord used to construct it has either broken or become damaged to the point ya can't use it. Note that if this happens in MRS/DdRT, your in big trouble, likely falling. However it went, when one is removed, your rope moves in the crotch a few inches until the tension is even on both sides and you are attached by your Garda and "best friend" which is attached to the redundant bridge. (Assuming your geometry is good, the footloop is adequately long that you can still step up off the best friend and onto it again when you need to. If it's not, you would need to untie the bottom part of it from a double loop into a longer, single loop... assuming you can get your foot out of it to begin with.) At this stage, we have a partially compromised system. Our risk profile is higher than it has ever been. We are in Uncharted Territory. We always should make a phone call even if we're going to proceed on our own.
System repair options:
Option 1: reach into your saddle bag and grab whatever your emergency cord is. Or emergency prusik loop. Tie that using your preferred friction hitch to repair the broken device. Any hitch will do provided that you could break it under load. If you can't break it under load, you can always pull up that boat clip that's on the end of your line and use it as a breaking device. As an absolute last resort, i always have a 96in web loop i use as a deer drag. It can be used to make a Bachmann with a spare beaner.
Option 2: pull the long side of your rope up from the ground. Using the last 4 feet, tie a knot to your main bridge and the end gets a Blake's hitch. If you understand what I'm saying, the last few feet of your rope become a Blake's hitch repair for the missing friction device.
Option 3: untie the surviving hitch. Carefully (dont drop it), construct a loop out of it with a secure bend, Hunters is fine. Form a Klemheist which grabs BOTH lines. (This is the same method that arborist use for foot locking). Clip into that with you main bridge.
Ok, no matter which option you chose, now you need to step up onto your foot Loop and slide your friction hitches up to take load and unload the Garda. Then remove garda and rappel as per normal.
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All of this is under the assumption that you don't have your system rigged for the next strap option. If you do, there are already a pair of spare friction hitches on the ground tied to your ends. You just pull one of those up and use it. Of course, you will need to untie it and retie it so it passes over the garda.
And the last option is one for the future: break the garda under load. How? I have a way. Let's save that.
Hmmm. I just thought of something. What do you think of this idea: one way to make sure that the users of the system always have a spare cord is to have them tie it onto the long side of their climbing rope when they first rigged their system. It will always be there just waiting for an emergency. I think it's better to have it tied onto the Rope then assume they still have it in their saddle bag. What do you think?
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