pawilkes wrote:i've been really surprised at the number of and specific people who say to lower and to not rappel. maybe all these strong climbers never get on a route that is vertical enough to reasonably clean on rappel. rappelling is a basic skill, every climber who can belay should know how to do it. doing it safely isn't any harder than belaying. knowing how to rappel will only I personally don't rappel that much because most of the time i'm climbing on steep sport routes. I rarely tie knots because i can see the rope is down. all these "tie knots in the end of your ropes or your an idiot" comments are good intentioned but by this logic everyone should keep a knot in the end of your rope when belaying which i guess almost no one does around here.
I think this comment is quite enlightening. Of course "everyone should keep a knot in the end of your rope when belaying"! I think one of the stupidest accidents of all is when the belayer performs what fly fishermen would call a "long distance release". That is they "release" the leader as the end of the rope zips through their belay device. That particular accident would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic.
Don't forget that sport climbing is a subset of rock climbing, which is itself a subset of mountaineering. At one time we pretty much approached all climbs as if they were traditional multi-pitch climbs. The belayer was actually tied in to the end of the rope - always!. That way, no matter what, the one thing that could never happen was for the rope to simply zip through his device and be gone (along with the leader). Same thing for a knot in the end of your rap line. At least you knew one thing, you'd never fly off the end of the rope. Pretty simple stuff, really. The best part about doing it this way, YOU HAD TO CHANGE NOTHING ABOUT YOUR TECHNIQUE as you moved from one pitch climbs to big walls and high mountain routes. You'd already developed proper habits.
Today, in order to save a few seconds, I suppose, climbers ingrain all sorts of bad habits. Why on earth would you want to take short cuts at the crag that will almost guarantee your getting in trouble on multi-pitch routes and, as we have seen, will eventually bite you in the ass on short sport routes as well. Do everything "the right way" even at the sport crag and you won't have re-learn how roped technique is "correctly executed" later.