Climbing techniques – Is it OK to use a top rope on poorly protected trad routes to push your grade?

As regular readers of my blog will know, I have been writing a series on climbing techniques, focusing particularly on climbing improvement. This has involved a good deal of research and learning from climbers far more experienced than I.

At the same time, I have been working hard to follow this advice to improve my own climbing. One of my targets is to push my outdoor trad-climbing grade from VS to E1.

Now the winter is out of the way and we’re starting to see some good weekend weather, I have been able to get back out on the crags to see if what I have learned through the winter, on the indoor walls has paid dividends.

Last Sunday my brother David and I headed over to the Peak District to climb at Frogatt and Curbar, then over to Millstone for a bit of crack climbing. While climbing at Curbar we found a nice HVS slab climb called Short Slab. I felt this might be a good introduction to leading at HVS level. We started a bit of a ground level inspection of the route, it looked like a reasonable slab, good holds at the bottom part then tiny features for hands and feet from about a third of the way up. The only thing putting us off was the lack of protection. There was a pocket, about 2 moves in that would take a cam. After that – nothing! This meant that from the half way point of the climb, if you slipped off one of those tiny features, you would be hitting the deck – ouch!

Now I’m not averse to risk. I have climbed pitches on big multi-pitch routes where the climbing was easy enough to give me the confidence to put little or no gear in. The consequence of falling from one of these pitches would almost certainly have been death or serious injury, but I felt there was very little risk of falling off. Climbing a slab where for most of it there are no real holds carries a pretty significant risk of falling off, so I naturally felt a bit nervous about it.

David and I decided that in the interests of safety we would climb the route on a top rope. This gave us both the confidence to make the bold moves required to complete it without any real risk of injury. We both cleaned the route without a slip, but I couldn’t help feeling that it would have been extremely easy to slip off. Perhaps I have still to gain more trust in the grip that rock shoes give you on grit stone.

I think that to continue to try to push my grade, I’ll be lead well-protected routes with harder moves. The poorly protected ones I will climb on a top rope until I’m confident enough in my ability to lead them. Obviously they will be recorded in my training diary as being top roped (I would never advocate cheating. After all, you’re only cheating yourself).

My view is that at the end of the day, for most of us rock climbing is about fun. There is an element of risk, which is a big part of what makes it fun. However, there’s little point exposing yourself to so much risk that the odds of a serious incident (probably involving an unscheduled ride in a helicopter) is the result. Surely no fun is worth that.

I’m really interested to hear your views on this. Please feel free to comment below.