Racking wires for ‘trad’ climbing
It’s rock-climbing season again as winter fades away and the April showers start to blow over for good (I hope). For the next few issues of the Newsletter I’m going to look at some more tips on racking your trad rock climbing gear on your harness, specifically racking wires.
When you buy a set of wires (Sizes 1-11) or even two sets, one each from different brands, a novice will often rack all wires from the set on a single karabiner. It seems logical enough and looks sort of neat.
However, in reality, when we place a wire we will have spotted a particular crack of a particular size, so in reality the choice of which wire will fit into is limited to two or three wires. To make finding the right wire easier, divide your fell complement of wires into two or three groups of similar sizes and then rack similar sized wires together on their own karabiner (small wires, medium wires and large wires.)
My ‘favourite’ (most used) karabiner of wires is without doubt the one that holds one each of a DMM Wallnut and Wild Country Rock in Sizes 4,5 & 6 along with DMM Offsets Sizes 7, 8 & 9. When you look at the colour coding, this means 3 gold, 3 blue and 3 red.
