The best rock climbing rope

To be able to choose a good rock climbing rope it’s pretty important. It is one of yours most important rock climbing pieces of gear which saves you from falling to the ground. Properly chosen rock climbing rope can also make your climbing experience nice and smooth compared with total misery when using wrong rope.

Here you can find few tips from Rockbusters on what to look for to be able to gain confidence when climbing hard or high and will assist you when you're out there buying a new rock climbing rope.

As most of you probably know for rock climbing we use dynamic ropes. Of course there is use of static or semi static ropes when rock climbing but it will alway be used for taking photos, rigging or houling. Never use it for taking the falls.

Dynamic rope will stretch when taking a fall and that will reduce dramatically all the forces hitting the climber and also to the whole security system as the bolts or trad gear the climber have placed.

When sport climbing we are looking for a single dynamic rope which will be our main concern here. Single dynamic rope can be used independently as most of you are used to and have seen. They are used for indoor and outdoor sport climbing and also for not too complicated multipitch climbs. 

There are also half ropes which can be clipped independently into a piece of protection and twin ropes. They always need to be clipped together into one piece. These are used for trad, mix or multipitch climbs when you search for a way to reduce the drag or higher safety due to rope damage possibilities such as falling rocks, sharp edges, … They can also be joined in one for abseiling and provide twice longer abseil option.

Let's look a bit closer to single dynamic rock climbing ropes where the need for good tips could be mostly needed because of lack of previous experience with climbing. 

Diameter (the thickness of the rope)

Single dynamic rock climbing rope will be signed as 1 in a circle, see the picture above. The diameter of single dynamic rock climbing rope can range between 8.6mm to 11mm and as said before they will be used for outdoor and indoor sport climbing mostly.

There is quite a simple way to look into this. For outdoor sport climbing we recommend diameter around 9.3mm to 9.8mm. Thinner ropes will be lighter and will create less drag. On other hand thicker ropes will last longer. The difference will be noticeable when climbing really long, 40-50m projects or when projecting something really hard and wearing off the rope a lot. In these two cases one could go thinner or thicker but in general we can say diameter between 9.3mm to 9.8mm is ideal for outdoor sport climbing.

Indoor climbing, I personally use my old rock climbing ropes which have been shortened so much they don’t have any outdoor use for me. Anyway you do not want to use your nice 80m thin rope and waste it in the gym on 10-15m limbs, right. So if you do not have any older rope you do not use anymore outdoors, buy a 40m 10.5mm dynamic rock climbing rope to climb indoors. It will last forever and it will save many days of our nice rope.

Length 

The most common failure when sport climbing is dropping the climber down when lowering or falling down when abseiling because the rope is not long enough. It has happened to the best rock climbers out there and yes, there is an easy and effective solution. ALWAYS MAKE A KNOT ON THE END OF YOUR ROPE, ALWAYS !! 

Choosing the proper length of your rock climbing rope is not that complicated. Always think where you will be climbing and check how long the routes are. Double it and add 10m so you can happily cut the ends as they will wear out faster. 

Anyway nowadays the tendency is to bolt long single pitch routes, some of them will go even to 50m but 35-40m is not that uncommon anymore. And climbers do have the tendency to travel a lot and visit new climbing spots so if you will look for one outdoor sport climbing rope 70-80m with diameter 9.3-9.5mm will do it all fine. Just remember: ALWAYS MAKE A KNOT ON THE END OF YOUR ROPE, ALWAYS !! 

SINGING ROCK

Here are Rockbusters when sport climbing and nailing our projects we do climb with Singing Rock Icon 9.3mm. Very good rope from a small Czech producer of cool climbing gear.