summary of Half Ropes vs. One Rope + Tag Line/Pull Cord

-Difficult rope management (not even sure how: can they be flaked together, or do you need two separate piles? Hanging belays would be a bitch)

do you lead with the tag line attached to your harness's haul loop, or is it stuffed in your follower's pack?

Are you saying I'm un-merican because I use doubles?

Since short climbs are usually best done with a single, people will have a single. They can then add a tag line if they
need to do full length rappels. Whereas doubles/twins are usually only good for multipitch with full length raps.

Mammut's 9.5 Infinity comes in at 58 g/m and their 8.0 phoenix twin at 42 g/m, resulting in a total system weight of 13.23 lbs.

Whereas doubles/twins are usually only good for multipitch with full length raps.

80 meter is definitely where it us headed

Any logic at all in using one 80m (or 100?) single? I'm thinking of the new very light ropes they now rate for anything, half/twin/single. Are full 60 meter raps very often absolutely necessary?

How Clint describes using a tag line is how every climber I've ever met uses a tag line. The biner block thing posted above looks like it would get stuck on a rap down a featureless slab, yet I see it recommended online all the time. Weird.

^^^...and leaves you many pitches up with no lead line in your control.

I have not seen such a collection of anecdotal technical climbing misinformation in a very long time.

-Falls potentially generate more stretch, leading to a softer catch and less forces on gear (when used as halves, not twins)

half ropes have similar or higher impact force than single ropes (when the tests are done with equal weight of course, not the BS-good-for-nothing 55kg half-rope UIAA test)

It makes sense to test with a lower weight because of the way that half ropes catch falls

n answer to the oft repeated question:" Why do they test half ropes singly with only 55kg", I was the American delegate (of the AAC) on the UIAA Safety Commission when the Half Rope Standard was put in place. Tests done at the time by Pit Schubert of the DAV (German Alpine Club) showed that any half rope that would withstand 5 UIAA test falls with a 55 kg test mass would also withstand one UIAA test fall with the 80kg mass. The argument presented to the members of the Commission at the time was that it would be impossible to get the lighter ropes which climbers (and guides ) wanted, to pass a harsher test, and that the real goal was to insure that a half rope would sustain at least one of the worst imaginable falls in the field, that being the fall represented by the UIAA single rope test. The repeated falls caught with the 55kg mass were accepted as the minimum repeatable test standard to insure this desired result. Over the approx 20 years that we've had the half rope standard , the Standard has proved to be high enough. (before the UIAA Standard was approved, people just climbed on half ropes without UIAA approval, assuming that both ropes would never be cut at the same time in the same fall, which has proved to be true in practice).
I accept that this reason may seem less than scientific to many. It was based on many tests carried out by the different certified UIAA test labs at the time, and as I remember was passed in near, if not total, unanimity by the voting members of the Commission, National delegates and Rope Manufacturers alike. There is one thing that encourages me at present as to the wisdom of this decision at the time-- rope manufacturing has made huge progress over the past 20 years, and this test still seems to hold up. Modern half ropes are much better than the ones I first used in France and Great Britain in the 70's.

I do not know if this longer fall is due to the half rope stretching more or the fact that most belayers are not nearly as good at catching falls on half ropes as they think they are.....