Belay Commands for Rock Climbers

by Expert Village

Summary: Belay commands are the communication between the belayer and the climber in rock climbing. Learn several unique terms used when belaying a rock climber in this free rock climbing lesson on video.

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Transcript for: Belay Commands for Rock Climbers

"Hi, I'm Bill with Zoar Outdoor on behalf of expertvillage.com. We're here today at Chapel Ledges in Ashfield, Massachusetts, Trustees of the Reservations Property and in this series I'm going to be talking about preparing to climb. Belay commands are the communication between the climber and the belayer. They can be formal or they can be informal, but the communication needs to be clear and you don't want to make a mistake. So, at the base of the cliff in a top rope situation, in a social belay situation we're going to be standing next to each other and that's going to make it real easy. First steps is the climber asking if he or she is on belay, so in order to know if they're on belay I need to look at a bunch of things. I need to check the climber's knot, the climber's harness, is the climber wearing a helmet or climbing shoes. Whatever they've got on is working I need to look at myself. I've got on a harness, buckled correctly, I've got the belay device set up correctly and my carabiners locked and all the slack is out of the rope. So at that point I can say belay is on! Then, we're going to double check just to make sure we didn't have any confusion there. The climber is going to tell me they're ready to climb. Ready to climb! And just to make sure I'll say, climb away. So that's the basic beginning, from there on once the climber's on the cliff they might need some adjustments on the rope and this can get confusion because we're going to be at a distance. So there are two words about moving the rope; one is slack which means make the rope looser please. The other is rope or up rope which means make the rope tighter. But saying bring in the rope, take out the rope, from a distance it might sound the same, so rope and slack sound different and they're much less confusing. Other commands you might hear at the top of the cliff or somewhere where the climber wants to take a rest, you might hear them say take. Take means I want to lean back on the rope on way or another, so take out the slack so that I'm not going to take 6 steps backwards after I lean back. Pretty simple to do, take in the rope and there you are. So other than that whatever you might work out with your climbing partner will be okay as long as it's clear and you both understand it. You might hear other commands at a cliff or you might hear people who don't use those traditional formalize commands and you'll probably get to that point at some point as well, but starting out it's good to know the standard on belay, belay on, ready to climb, climb away, you look like you know what you're doing and you can climb with anybody that way."

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