Essential Self-Rescue Skills

Essential Self-Rescue Skills

This is a two-day course covering tips, tricks and practising rescue scenarios that anyone could come across in the outdoors. These essential skills you should know to become a safe outdoor climber, and the tool-box of skills you can draw from to enhance your everyday climbing experience will be valuable as well!

BASIC RESCUE SKILLS ALL CLIMBERS SHOULD KNOW

Would you know what to do if something out-of-the-ordinary happened while you and a partner were out rock climbing? Are you sure? This course lays the foundations for self rescue in some of the most common situations rock climbers find themselves in. A full 2-day course will give you a set of skills you can use regularly – not just in the odd “emergency” situation, but often to make your normal climbing day a little more comfortable as well. Make no mistake – all outdoor climbers of all levels should know and have spent dedicated time practicing these skills. I am often told that the “Essential Rescue” weekend is among the most fun and informative weekends that many of my participants have done. I hope you will agree!

What will we learn?

On this course you will learn:

• Tying off a belay device
• Escaping the belay to attend to an emergency situation
• Z-drags and assisted hoists
• Additional prusik knots and their uses
• Prusiking up, and prusiking past a knot
• Abseiling down, and abseiling past a knot
• Retrievable single rope abseil
• Lowering a partner past a knot (i.e. lowering a partner more than the rope length)
• Various ways to belay if you don’t have a belay device

Prerequisites

The participants start this session with knowledge of indoor “lead” climbing, and will have a lead-pass from any indoor climbing gym.

Location

This course is held on an outdoor location on real trad climbing routes. The area we climb at and the grade of the routes will be tailored to the group participant’s skill levels.

Duration

12 hours contact time split over two sessions.

What do we need to own/bring?

The only piece of equipment you need to own before this course is a standard climbing harness suitable for lead-climbing indoors. All other climbing safety equipment is provided by Melbourne Climbing School, however if you own any of the following equipment please bring it along with you – learning with your own equipment is far better and will provide a great start to your outdoor climbing experience!

• Helmet *
• One locking biner suitable for belaying
• One belay device
• If you own a chalk bag, rope, quickdraws, slings and any other sport- or trad-climbing equipment please let us know prior to the course, and we can plan to teach you using your own gear instead.
• • Helmets are worn on all outdoor Melbourne Climbing School courses – but as with all of the other climbing safety equipment, we have these if you don’t own one, and we will not charge any extra for their use on the course.
• Closed footwear such as tennis shoes are fine for learning on if you do not own climbing shoes.
• Non-climbing gear: You will need to bring suitable clothing and footwear for light hiking, and your own lunch and water for the day (and a camera!).