Improvised Self-Rescue

1 to 3-Day Course

This course is essential for any serious climber. The key to safe climbing is risk management. Understanding the risks associated with the sport allow climbers to successfully prevent major accidents. However, accidents do happen and having the skills and knowledge in order to help an injured climber is the ultimate risk prevention technique. In this course, we will teach you the essentials of self-rescue.

Techniques and skills discussed will include escaping the belay, aiding a victim, lowering an injured climber, raising an injured climber with a pulley system, building safety and rescue anchors, rappelling with an injured victim, minimum safety rescue equipment, improvised techniques for carrying an injured victim to safety, and more if time permits.

This course can be taken as one, two or three days. Day one is spent on the CMRCA wall learning essential knots for self rescue as well as the essential skill of escaping the belay and transferring the load to the anchor.

Day two allows you to practice the belay escape on real rock as well as learn how to rappel with an injured victim, ascend the rope with minimal equipment and if time permits, raising systems.

Day three brings the course together with a mock rescue in which you complete a full rescue from the middle of a cliff. It is also possible to learn about rescuing a fallen leader if time permits.

If your goal is to increase your knowledge of safety systems and participate in rock climbing in the safest possible manner, this is the ideal course. You must be a competent lead climber and have some multi-pitch experience to take this course. The amount of material covered in this course is entirely dependent on the ability of the student to progress through the concepts.