Don’t forget to floss. This beauty is an 8.1mm twin rope, meaning it is designed to be used with another twin rope running through the same pieces of protection. It can be used singly for situations where there is no danger of a severe fall, for example glacier travel, which is what I use it for.
The 60m length (just under 200 feet) is ideal for areas where the crevasses are truly monstrous, such as Alaska and the Karakoram. I typically travel with just one climbing partner and this leaves plenty of room even rigged up with a Kiwi coil, my preferred method for glaciers.
The small diameter means light weight and easy handling. The minus is that some belay devices, prussik-minding pullies and autoblocks can be a little skittish, so make sure your devices work with ropes this size.
One response to “BlueWater Ice Floss rope”
Can’t emphasize enough the need to make sure that if you’re going to use this rope for glacier travel, that your ascenders – and your team’s (they’ll have to pull you out of the hole if you can’t climb out by yourself) – are rated for a rope this diameter. It would be really, really bad to fall into a crevasse only to find that your ascenders won’t grip the rope. Ditto on use of prussik loops – make sure that your prussik cord is sufficiently small in diameter that your prussiks will actually grip this small diameter rope. Finally, think twice before using this rope by itself for glacier travel. It’s narrow enough, and dynamic enough, that you’ll fall a long, long, long way into a crevasse before it’ll stop your fall, and the further you fall into a crevasse, the lower the probability that you’ll survive the fall.