The Pre-Clean and Mussy Hooks: A Disastrous Combination
As a guide, I often use the tactic of pre-cleaning anchors when cragging. This has a few benefits. For one, it allows my guests to get more climbing in since I don’t have to take an additional lap up route just to clean the anchor. Second, it’s safer for me since I can stay on the ground instead of relying on an inexperienced guest to belay me. Finally, pre-cleaning allows me to string up multiple top-ropes with minimal gear (each route only requires a single carabiner). Even with these advantages, I've found myself using the pre-clean less frequently lately, either out of convenience to my guests, the types of anchors I’m seeing in the field, or from a concern of safety.
I’ve found many of my clients struggle with removing the redirect carabiner. It can be challenging to unweight the system (a requirement in this case) to remove the rope from the carabiner. One way to make this easier is to hold the carabiner with the arm being used to support your weight, then use your free hand to remove the rope. Once the rope is out, the climber can ask for tension and fully remove the redirect carabiner while being held by the belayer. Even so, inexperienced climbers may still struggle with this process. The anchor could also not be conducive to a pre-clean. These situations include vertically staggered anchors, horizontally spaced anchors without long chain, or any anchor system with open hardware, i.e. mussy hooks. For the first two examples, a pre-clean just doesn’t work as intended: the movement of the rope wears the fixed hardware even with our redirect carabiner. For open hardware the safety of the system is compromised. To understand how, let’s take a closer look at a possible scenario.
With a pre-clean, the redirect carabiner needs to be higher than the fixed hardware. The rope runs through one side of the fixed hardware, then up to the redirect, and back down to the other fixed hardware. The vast majority of the time, mussy hooks are installed facing the same direction. This facilitates clipping and mitigates the chance of the gate being opened by rubbing the rock. One may point out that this lack of opposite and opposed is less than ideal, but the risk of unclipping the rope is incredibly low if the climber stays below the mussy hooks. That is a given when just clipping to finish a lead of the route, but not when pre-cleaning. In fact, pre-cleaning forces the rope to be in this dangerous position, opening the door for the rope to drape over the mussys in the reverse direction they are clipped, causing them to become completely unclipped (not unlike a backclip in sport climbing). The consequences of this can be deadly.
For this reason, I advocate against pre-cleaning routes with mussy hooks.
So what should we do instead?
Well, the simplest solution may be to just top-rope through the fixed gear without a redirect. This enables a less experienced person to be the final climber on a route without the risk of a catastrophic failure. In fact, it comes with an additional benefit over the pre-clean: the climber is not required to finish the route since there is no gear to retrieve. However now we have a new problem. By top-roping through the fixed gear, we are pre-maturely wearing out material that may be hard to replace. At the same time, we are modeling this behavior to new climbers. They may overapply this technique, blindly trusting dangerously worn fixed gear or rolled aluminum rappel rings. Until all climbers start carrying a fresh set of mussy hooks to the crag and the wrenches to install them, I don’t believe this is the answer. Donating to your local climbing organization or the American Safe Climbing Association is fantastic, but it doesn’t absolve you from your actions, nor does it actually get the hardware on the wall.
We could construct an anchor with a masterpoint that hangs well below the mussy hooks, then have our novice friend place the rope into the fixed gear before cleaning the anchor. The danger of backclipping can be eliminated since now we can have locked carabiners on the lowest point of our anchor. However, I’m wary of sending up inexperienced people to perform such a high consequence task in a stressful environment. The likelihood of something going wrong is slim, but there is a chance of confusion and even cleaning an anchor with open hardware requires a specific order of operations. Something trivial like the carabiners being hard to remove could cause someone new to cleaning anchors to panic. In my opinion, it’s best to not send people into high states situations they are not ready to deal with.
Perhaps another practical solution is just to have a person able to confidently clean anchors climb the route again. This isn’t a svelte solution, but it sure works. Taking a little more time to demonstrate good stewardship is well worth it in my book.
If someone wants to continue climbing outdoors, they should learn how to clean a route. This is best taught on the ground, not by yelling up vague instructions from the ground to a rightfully frightened novice. Some people have advocated for anchor cleaning ground-level stations to be installed at the crag to facilitate this kind of learning. While that is a possibility, I don’t see how such a station should be the route developer’s responsibility. The individuals that established the crag have already put in unfathomable amounts of time, effort, and money into a resource that countless people get to use for free. If someone wants to teach anchor cleaning at the crag, the onus should be on them to bring whatever materials they need to do so, be it a Remsboard or a cheap DIY anchor board. Not only is it cheaper, but a portable board is infinitely more versatile than a in-situ station.
