Site Search

Roped Rescue

The origins of roped rescue go back hundreds if not thousands of years; however roped based rescue as we know it today owes its ancestry to alpinism. The first alpine rescue text was penned in 1574 by Josias Simler called Vallesiae et Alpium description. Subjects such as avalanche avoidance, use of crampons and rescue were dealt with in a ground breaking doctrine and unsurprisingly many of these basic techniques are still used today.

By the Industrial Revolution, the middle classes were flocking to the mountains and a new class of Guides were born to safeguard passage. This era saw the birth of lightweight fall protection systems such as embryonic belay techniques, chocks and pitons. Techniques were traded between the mountaineering and caving communities and in 1931, Dr Karl Prussik, described a new hitch technique as a replacement for ascending a hemp ladder.

Following the 2nd World War a new breed of adventurers and Guides stared upwards challenging “impossible” peaks and undertaking equally improbable rescues as ambitions often ran out of technique, talent and technology. Gravity always seemed to win, however the quest for adventure and the tenacious nature of the human spirit continued to drag embryonic rescue techniques to new heights.

In 1952 Bill Cuddington of Virginia imported rapelling and prussiking from Europe to North America. 1958 saw the first batch of handled ascenders in Switzerland built by Walter Marti, designed to descend to birds nests balanced precariously on cliff faces. The Bobbin Descender came to prominence in the 1950s in Europe, whilst the Rappel Rack was first designed by John Cole of Alabama in 1966 and the Gibbs Ascender became commercially available in 1968.

This era of technology evolution was to set foundations that modern day rope rescue technology is still built upon today. From technology advancement came methodology innovation and none are more significant than the Belay Competence Drop Test Method designed by the British Columbia Council for Technical Rescue in 1982. This set a standard for rescue systems throughout N America that has endured largely unscathed as the benchmark to which rescue systems must aspire.

So where are we today? Rope rescue currently exists uneasily in a place whose fundamentals date back to ships with sails against a back drop of over reliance on technology. Human power can be replaced by infinitely more efficient machines which in turn are getting smaller, faster cheaper and cleverer. Despite this technology drive, the fundamental ingredients of rope rescue appear to remain unchanged: use gravity over brawn, adapted simplicity always beats complex technology and when in doubt it all comes back to the anchors. Throw in a measure of courage and unselfishness and you have a system that has changed preciously little since the times of Simler.

Author - Jez Hunter