edelweiss speleo

[bradyfl]

has anyone used this?

thoughts and opinions?

http://www.edelweiss-ropes.com/en/ropes/26-speleo-11-mm.html

[Shane S]

I bought a 300 ft cut three years ago. Edelwiss “Cave Rope”. It’s not as anti abrasive as PMI pit rope but as long as you pad or re-belay you should be fine. It’s good quality European rope and it is tested with tight QC control limits. With that said keep in mind that the European cavers have different technique than TAG cavers. They typically use a less stiff and often a smaller mm rope but use more re-belay and less padding.
The downfall I found to this rope is that it fits the category of a semi static. The stretch was just out of the static range at something like 3.2% I’m thinking without going back and looking it up. You are going to encounter lots of bounce, especially over 200 ft.
The advantage is that it’s lightweight and can be coiled up small and compact.
As for my 300’ cut, I ended up cutting it up into three 100 footers. I often still use this rope on multidrop caves where rope must be hiked into horizontal portions of the cave. Using smaller lighter rope like this I can put all or most of the ropes for the multidrops in a bag. If you have ever pushed a coil of rope in a tight belly crawl with water, you would understand the advantage to this.

[Anonymous_Coward]

It's nice rope if you know how to rig euro. You can't treat it like PMI pit, but it's pretty good. Many Euros like the bounce because it absorbs energy, keeping more of shock loads in the rope and off of single bolt rebelays. There is also a climbing technique where you can get in sync with the bounce for sort of a turbo effect while climbing.

[Shane S]

Excellent point about the bounce and single bolting. And the bounce can be good once you get used to it and get a rhythm.