How I learned to break a carabiner, by accident

2023/08/04

Several weeks ago, I was going rock climbing at the Bethel site in Sudbury with my friend. Considering I had just ordered some new 9cm carabiners and my first rope, we were both pretty excited. We would finally be able to set two top ropes at once, which was a big deal because we could climb two routes before having to climb the cliff again to move our anchors.

For the uninitiated, a top-rope anchor is in rock-climbing when you lack quickdraws or trad gear so that a belayer can catch a fall from the climber to prevent an injury. They are usually attached to bolts drilled into the rock, and consist of a few carabiners and slings or rope holding the belay rope. Here’s an example we set up from a climb at Timberwolf.

We climbed to the top of the crag and chose two routes to set up. From the Climb Sudbury routes (available here), we chose routes 9 and 10. I was setting up my anchor at route 10. I usually use two 9 cm carabiners to clip slings to the bolts, and the larger 11 cm carabiners to place the belay rope over. Due to the way the left bolt was oriented against the surrounding rock, I had a hard time getting my carabiner into the correct position, where the screwgate would face away from the rope and the wire part faced downward. I tried to move the chain link on top of the bolt to make more room, but I ended up getting the carabiner wedged firmly in-place. A half hour of trying to pry it free resulted in just disappointment. An image of roughly how it was stuck is included below:

We still climbed, and we had a decent time, but I could not get the carabiner unlocked to grab my partner’s sling. We decided that we would come back two days later to remove the carabiner in order to leave the crag in its usual state, and to recover the sling.

For tools, I bought a cheap hacksaw from Canadian Tire. I made sure to grab a carbide-tipped blade to cut through the aluminum carabiner, and bought a few extras incase the blade broke. I also brought a wrench just in case.

We returned to the crag, and climbed back up to route 10. Sure enough, the carabiner was still there. I unsheathed my hacksaw from my backpack, and removed the wingnut to turn the blade around. “This should be straighforward”, I thought. And it would have been, had I not dropped the wing nut off the cliff and into the lake.

Immediately, an overwhelming feeling of stupidity washed over me. I just made my hacksaw completely useless. Something else would have to do. First, I loosely clipped into to one of the bolts with a sling and a few carabiners as a light safety. It would not catch a hard fall, but would provide some pull to keep me from slipping. I used my wrench around the carabiner and pried as hard as I could. Back and forth, and back and forth. I was able to rotate the carabiner 180 degrees at some point. After a few minutes, the lesson about the hacksaw came back to the forefront of my mind, and I had enough thought to tie the wrench to myself so I would not drop it.

Eventually, when my forearms were pretty pumped after a half hour of this, the mighty 9 cm carabiner gave way to metal fatigue and snapped. There was no obvious damage to the bolt, and we were able to recover the sling. Interestingly, the carabiner broke at the gate and immediately opposite to the gate, which was where I used thw wrench.

At the end of the day, there are a few lessons to be learned from this unfortunate sitation:

1. If it looks like it won’t fit, and feels like it won’t fit, do not force it.
2. Anything that you cannot afford to drop should be tied to you.
3. Use the right tool, consider a wiregate or a smaller carabiner for tight anchors.
4. Bring a small toolbox along for a climb, just in case.

Hopefully you never make the same mistake as me, and if you do, I hope you have the tools to fix it the first time around.