Your first multi-pitch: how to move as a team on a long route

The route is easy, the day is not

Most people's first multi-pitch is technically the easiest climbing they have done in months. A Diff or a V Diff, big holds, low angle, nothing on it that would trouble you at the wall. And it still takes six hours and leaves you wrung out.

That is not a failure. It is the whole point. On a single pitch the climbing is the hard part and everything else is admin you do standing on flat ground. On a long route the climbing is the easy part and everything else moves up onto a ledge halfway up a cliff, where it is windy, you cannot see your partner, and you have nowhere to put anything down.

So treat your first one as a systems day rather than a climbing day. Pick something two or three grades below what you lead comfortably, and spend your attention on the rope rather than the rock.

Pick the right route

The route matters more than the grade. What you want is short, popular, well protected and easy to escape.

• Three or four pitches, not ten. Long enough to do a real changeover twice, short enough that a slow day is still a day out.
• Low angle. Slabs let you stand on your feet and think. A steep route punishes fumbling.
• A walk-off descent. Not a series of abseils. Coming down is where most first-timers get into trouble, and a path solves it.
• Somewhere with people on it. Being third in a queue of parties on a classic is oddly reassuring the first time.

In the UK the obvious choice is the Idwal Slabs in Cwm Idwal, low angle, several hundred feet of it, routes from Diff upward, a walk-off at the top and a twenty minute approach from the Ogwen valley. Half of British climbing learned to move on a rope there. The equivalents are everywhere: Tryfan's ridges, Little Tryfan for practice, Subluminal on Portland if you want it short and sunny.

What actually changes when you leave the ground

Four things, and they are all logistics.

You carry everything. No rucksack at the base to go back to. Water, a jacket, a phone, a bit of food, the guidebook page, and that is it. Everything else stays in the car because you will be wearing or clipping it for six hours.

You belay upwards, not downwards. At the top of each pitch the leader builds an anchor and brings the second up. The rope now goes up from you to the leader, which changes how you take it in and how a fall would load the system. Practise a direct belay off the anchor before you need it three pitches up.

You cannot hear each other. Wind, a bulge in the rock, sixty metres of air. Agree the commands and, more usefully, agree what you will do when you cannot hear them. Rope going tight and continuous is almost always the signal to take the belay apart and start climbing.

Time behaves differently. A five minute fiddle at each changeover is half an hour over a route. Nobody feels slow while it is happening. Everyone is slow the first time, so start early and give the day more room than you think it needs.

The changeover, in order

This is the bit that eats the time, and it is just a sequence. Do it the same way every time and it becomes quick.

1. Leader arrives, builds the anchor, clips in, and shouts safe.
2. Second takes the belay apart and calls climbing when the rope comes tight.
3. Leader belays the second up off the anchor, stacking the rope neatly as it comes in. Stack it in loops over your tie-in or a sling, longest first, so it feeds off the top without tangling.
4. Second arrives, clips into the anchor, and hands over the rack, sorted, before anything else.
5. Swap ends or swap leads. If you are alternating leads the rope is already stacked the right way up. If the same person leads every pitch, restack the rope before they set off, or the first thing they get is a knot.

Say each step out loud the first few times. It feels daft and it stops the one mistake that matters, which is somebody unclipping while nobody is holding them.

Racking so future you can find things

A rack on a long route is not a rack at a boulder. You are handing it to someone else on a ledge, in the wind, while both of you are tied to a rock.

Keep it in a fixed order and keep it the same all day. Small to large left to right, quickdraws on one side, slings over the shoulder, screwgates where your hand expects them. When the second arrives, the handover should be one movement rather than a conversation.

Take less than you think for an easy route. Two or three slings, a small set of cams and nuts, a handful of extendable draws. Weight on a low-angle slab is misery, and a bloated rack takes longer to sort at every stance.

Coming down

More first multi-pitch days go wrong on the descent than on the route. Read the descent before you leave the ground, not from the top.

If it is a walk-off, know which way it goes and roughly how long, and take a look at it from the valley on the approach. Coil the rope properly and carry it. Mountain descents are usually loose, often wet, and rarely obvious in cloud.

If it involves abseiling, that is a skill to learn on the ground with someone experienced before you use it in anger. Knot the ends of the rope, back the abseil up with a prusik, check the anchor twice, and never commit to a descent you have not seen or read about.

And keep an eye on the sky. British mountain rock goes from friendly to unpleasant in about ten minutes of rain, and a slab that felt like a staircase in the sun becomes a serious proposition wet.

Go with someone who has done it

The fastest way to learn all of this is to second a few routes behind someone competent, watching how they build anchors and how they run a changeover. A club meet, a partner with a few seasons on them, or an instructor for a day will teach you more than a winter of reading about it.

That is not a cop-out. Ropework is a physical craft. You need to see a good anchor built in front of you, and then build a few badly while someone tells you why they are bad.

Keep a record of the day

Long routes blur together far faster than boulder problems do. You will remember the route name and forget everything useful: how long the approach took, which pitch had the awkward stance, where the descent path actually started, what you wished you had brought.

Write it down the same evening while it is fresh. In Sendit that means logging the route with a note on the day, so the next time you plan something similar you are working from what happened rather than what you half remember. After a season of long routes, that record is the difference between guessing at a plan and knowing it.

The point of it

Multi-pitch climbing is slower, fussier and easier than the climbing you already do, and it is still the thing most climbers remember years later. Standing on a ledge two hundred feet up with a valley underneath you and your mate coming up the rope is a different sport to pulling on plastic, and it is available to anyone who leads a comfortable Severe.

Pick an easy classic, start early, and go slowly on purpose. The speed comes later.