PeterFJohnson wrote:I would also second the notion that sometimes carrying extra gear prevents you from developing technique that makes you less reliant on gear. With the exception of Andy dropping a bar every situation mentioned could have been safely negotiated without the use of a 3rd ascender. And in the case of the dropped rack bar, I would argue that if you are carrying a third ascender for quick deployment in case your descender starts to fail you should reevaluate your descender, not how many ascenders you have. I don't want to rely on getting a QAS on rope quickly to prevent a fall...
Ahhh, but Pete you are missing the point. As so often happens on cavechat, crucial details have been overlooked. I said myself that all of these situations CAN be negotiated safely without the third ascender. The point is, sometimes an extra piece of gear is NICE to have. It doesn't mean that you have to have it. (I'm not picking on you specifically, Pete. Just answering an overall tone that I am hearing in many of the responses here.)
I also never said that I carried the third just in case my descender started to fail. That's just what really happened. In that situation I had to get an ascender on rope quickly or I would be dead right now. But I'm actually not arguing that anyone should carry a third. I usually do, and was asked to list times that I had used it.
What it comes down to is that it is up to each person to decide what is crucial and what is "extra." It is worth noting that blind adherence to
Alpine Caving Techniques could also be considered dogmatic. At least here in Amurica, innovation and variety are still considered good things. Without them, we never would have had rappel racks, wedge bolts, braking carabiners, Pantins, LEDs, or really any of the gear or techniques that we are talking about here. We would all be climbing cable ladders on belay or getting hauled out of pits by winches.
I do agree it is a good idea to practice with "crucial" pieces of your system missing. This is how you learn to overcome problems. At the latest NCRC mock rescue, I was able to build a complete frog system with a 20 ft. webbing, two carabiners, a prusik loop, a spectra sling, and one miniTraxion, and used it to rappel and ascend a 70 ft. pit. All the years of carrying a 6-bar rack and a third ascender did not "prevent" me from knowing how to build and use it.
Minimal gear is a great and extremely useful philosophy, but to say it is the only way is a little short-sighted. I will also say that once you have to enact a vertical self-rescue from deep within a multi-drop cave, the lines between "extra" and "crucial" start to blur a little, and that can tend to affect what you carry from then on.