Anchoring MethodsSM

Students Per Instructor: 1, 2 or 3
Course Length: 2 Days (approx. 8 hours per day)
Seasons Offered: Spring, Summer, Fall
Alpine Mastery Method: Rock Mastery - Level III
Prerequisites: Following Skills Evaluation

Course Summary: This course addresses two specific goals. First, you will learn the basics of protection placement and anchor construction so you can later apply these skills as a leader. Second, you will learn to construct safe top rope systems so you can climb independently.

Reservations

Course Description:
Top-roping offers a safe and relatively simple alternative to the commitment associated with lead climbing, however, you must have a working understanding of anchoring techniques and other essential skills before you can safely go out on your own.

In this comprehensive course you'll learn about the theory underlying anchoring and top-roping, but more importantly, you'll get plenty of practice employing various techniques to actually set up top-rope systems under the careful supervision of your instructor.

Although there will be an opportunity to climb during this course, emphasis is placed on the process of constructing safe and efficient top-roped climbs under a wide variety of conditions.

Upon successfully completing our Anchoring Skills Evaluation at the end of this course, climbers will be capable of safely setting up and using top-roped climbs without the supervision of expert climbers. Based upon the large number of unsafe top-rope systems we've seen in use, the safety techniques we stress in this course are being ignored by far too many climbers.

Successful completion of our Following Skills Evaluation is a prerequisite for this course.