Passive protection, of which nuts are a key part, includes safety measures put in place as a rock climber ascends. Learn how to use nuts for passive protection in this climbing video.
JOSH HARING: Hi, I'm Josh and today I'm going to talk about passive protection. Protection in rock climbing's very important and it usually refers to traditional or pro. Traditional climbing means that there are no anchors on the rock and you're not top roping. You come to the base of a climb, you look up the face of a rock and you say, "I'm going to climb this thing." In order to do that, you need to be able to place protection along the way, so if you do fall, you're not going to fall to the bottom of the climb. Now there are 2 different types of protection, active and passive. Passive protection has to do with hexes, nuts, and stoppers. Hexes, nuts and stoppers are all placed in cracks. Usually a hex, as you can see by the hexagonal shape, is placed in a horizontal crack. Ideally, you'll find a crack that's big enough for the hex. You can slide the hex in and you want to place that hex inside the rock, so if you do fall, it's going to tighten itself inside the rock. You see, there's several different offset sizes and shapes of the sides of this hex, so ideally you can find the perfect placement with this hex somewhere inside a rock. Nuts and stoppers are a little bit smaller. They tend to be more symmetric in shape, though they are slightly offset on one side, so that again, you can find good placement inside of rocks. So you can see in this crack here, if we insert the nut and we go ahead and slide it down, you can see how that crack actually flares down a little bit there. If you are to fall and take a fall off of this nut, you're going to fall in the direction opposite where you placed this nut. So you'd be falling in this direction and that's just going to hold just fine. When talking about protection, the more the merrier. The more you can protect yourself, the safer off you'll be. It's not uncommon for it--on a fall, for a single piece to pull, but that second piece does catch you. The more protection you have, the more likelihood of slowing that momentum down. So you want to do your research beforehand. Most good guidebooks will tell you exactly what you need to climb that route. They'll say what size cracks there are and you'll be able to tell what size pieces you need to take before you go. You probably won't need a huge variety, but more likely will need several of the same size with you.
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