- What's up?
I'm Miranda with REI.
One of the first things you're gonna have to learn
if you're climbing is how to tie into your harness
using a figure eight follow through.
So I'm gonna show you how to do that today.
(upbeat music)
So the first thing I have to do before I start
feeding the rope through my harness
is tie a figure eight.
I'm gonna do that by taking the loose end of the rope
and pulling out about an arm's length, plus a shoulder,
of rope here.
And then I'm gonna make a loop like this.
Then I'm gonna take this loose end of the rope
and wrap it around the back,
come to the front,
and go through.
And that's our figure eight.
One of the most common mistakes is that people
will not wrap the rope around fully
and they'll just come through the front here
and then you wind up with an overhand knot.
One easy way to remember how to tie your figure eight
is to say to yourself, make a ghost,
strangle the ghost, and poke him in the eye.
And there's our figure eight.
Now that I have the figure eight,
I'm gonna go ahead and tie into my harness.
So I'll take the loose strand of rope
and feed it up through both hard points
or these two loops on my harness.
Some harnesses will only have one hard point
but most harnesses are gonna have both,
so you wanna make sure you feed through those.
Then I'm gonna go ahead and follow along these train tracks,
so to speak, on the figure eight.
So I'll take the loose end of rope,
go up through here.
Then I'm gonna go along the back.
And then keep following this under both here,
then around the back, down through here,
and up through the rope.
So now that I have my knot tied,
I need to go ahead and dress it or tighten it down
close to my harness, make it look pretty and clean.
We do this just so that you can see, easily see the pairs
and also because it'll be a lot easier to untie
after you've been sitting in the harness for a while.
So now that I have the knot tied,
I wanna make sure that I have at least six inches of tail
on my rope, so I have much more than that,
but an easy way to check is to take a flat palm,
put it close to the followed back figure eight
with your thumb up, and then you wanna make sure
that you have at least enough rope for that distance.
If you have too much like I do here,
you can always tie a stopper knot,
that's just to use excess rope.
You'll do this wrapping around the front
of your standing rope twice,
and then coming up through the bottom.
This is not a safety knot, it is a stopper knot.
So as long you have six inches of tail,
you won't need to do this, but if you have too much
you can always do that.
Now that I have my knot tied,
I'm going to do a quick check on it.
So I'm looking to make sure that the rope
goes through both hard points on my harness,
which is does, and then I'm looking for five pairs
of rope going up towards the standing rope.
So that's two, four, six, eight, and ten.
Then I have a stopper knot or six inches of tail.
I'm all set to go.
Now no video can replace the experience
of having an expert teach you how to tie into your harness
so we'd recommend finding an experienced climbing buddy
to teach you how to do this or taking a class
with your local REI, and always have someone experienced
check your knot before you begin climbing on it.
If you want more information about climbing,
you can check out our other videos
and if you haven't already, please subscribe.
That's it and we'll see you out there.
(upbeat music)