Ski Mountaineering Skills with Andrew McLean – Ropes from Backcountry Magazine on Vimeo.
This article was originally published in January, 2017.
In this episode, Andrew McLean gets tied up in the details about useful ski-mountaineering rope skills.
Each week, Basecamp TV, in collaboration with Andrew McLean, brings you new skills to help grow your ski mountaineering gray matter and improve your understanding of how to move in technical terrain. Over 11 episodes, McLean covers tips, tricks and techniques to get you safely into the mountains.
Basecamp TV’s Ski Mountaineering Skills with Andrew McLean is brought to you by Backcountry Magazine and Outdoor Research.
Shot on location in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and beyond
Cinematography by Jonah and Noah Howell
Editing by Noah Howell
This is and interesting series of short videos, and I’m sure will be helpful for many people. Re: the ropes and knots video: I would have liked to see Andrew talk a little about “dressing” his rewoven figure-eight knot. An un-dressed figure-eight knot with crosses in it is a knot with slack in it and thus it is possible for it to loosen farther and untie itself. The video even shows, after Andrew ties a rewoven figure-eight to a tree for an anchor, the knot with at least two prominent crosses in it. This is a loose knot, and a potentially dangerous knot. Remember that the whole process of using more rope and time and tiring a “backup knot” after the figure-eight (usually an overhand or double-overhand knot) while not wrong, is never necessary if the rewoven figure-eight is tied correctly without crosses and tightened correctly.