JOSH HARING: Hi I'm Josh and today I'm going to be talking to you about how to use quickdraws. Quickdraws are important. They're an essential link between the climbing rope and the rock wall. Quickdraws can be used in everything from sport climbing to traditional and the pro climbing. By definition, a quickdraw is just a piece of nylon with 2 carabiners on each side of that. Quickdraws are used to clip through a bolt or anchors on a rock face and then the rope is clipped through the other carabiner. The average climber needs anywhere from 6 to 20 quickdraws. It depends on the route in which you're going up. You should do the research before you climb to know exactly how many quickdraws you might need. It's always better to have one extra than 1 less. Most routes may have 3 or 4 bolts and that should tell you 4 quickdraws. If you're climbing pro or trad, you may need up to 20 quickdraws or more. The quickdraws can be kept on a sling around your chest or they can be kept on your harness. When placing protection, protection will go into the rock and the quickdraw will clip one side to the protection and the other side will be hanging free for the rope to slide through. The nylon runner between the 2 carabiners of a quickdraw can vary in length, from short to long. You want to make sure that your quickdraws are long enough that they're not pulling on the rope at an angle to which it would pull you off the route. You also want to make sure that the quickdraws are long enough that they don't risk being sliced on a sharp edge. Most quickdraws will have a rigid side to them. You want to clip the loose side of the quickdraw into the anchor and the rigid side; you want to be the side to you clip your rope into. When you're clipping rope, you don't want to have to worry about finding the opening to a quickdraw. You want to be able to clip that rope cleanly, smoothly, and very easily. We'd clip the end of our quickdraw there, and our rope would clip through the side of the other carabiner. So, if you were to fall on this, your rope would come down and fall--swing you down through this last quickdraw, and you'd be caught right here. So if we were climbing up this crack, essentially, this is what you'd start to see. You'd start to see a trail of protection, in this case passive protection. We could place another nut up in here, maybe even another nut up in here. We'd run our rope through here and one by one, you're further solidifying and securing your route. Also with protection, it's important to know that you're climbing usually with 2 people. The one going up first, we call the lead climber. They're the one actually placing that protection, whether it's active or passive. The one following up is going to clean the route. So if I was climbing up first, my partner would follow behind me. He would unclip each of these individually and clean the route as we go.
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