In addition, someone else in your party may be able to finish the climb, if there's easy top access you can rap or get lowered to retrieve gear, or a neighboring route may be close enough to let you recover your biner.

I'd suggest just spending $5.50 on a BD oval. Leave that sucker on your harness and you have a cheap alternative without cannibalizing a more expensive 'biner from your draw. That's probably less than you'll spend on gas getting to the crag or drinks/food afterward.

I normally respect your opinion, but that kind of logic would keep my kid in velcro shoes for the rest of his life.

I normally respect your opinion

The masses have spoken and I stand corrected. This injustice is what people taught me to do and truth be told I only have done it twice. But never again.

Eric

I normally respect your opinion, but that kind of logic would keep my kid in velcro shoes for the rest of his life.

Leave a biner and lower. There is no good reason to leave an entire draw.

There is a good reason and that reason is a beginner shouldn't be screwing around trying swap gear and the rope, it just opens the door to bad things happening. Let a more experienced partner go up and do it.

If there's one thing I know after this many years of climbing is there are a remarkably endless number of ways to screw up the simplest thing - beginners shouldn't tempt fate no matter how trivial the operation may seem on the surface.

There is a good reason and that reason is a beginner shouldn't be screwing around trying swap gear and the rope, it just opens the door to bad things happening. Let a more experienced partner go up and do it.

If there's one thing I know after this many years of climbing is there are a remarkably endless number of ways to screw up the simplest thing - beginners shouldn't tempt fate no matter how trivial the operation may seem on the surface.

When is a beginner not a beginner any longer?)

And how long did he climb with you before you cut him loose to figure out things on his own?

Well, he's still in velcro shoes and I still tie him in when he climbs. He's only 5.

My point was that Gabe's post made it sound like having to ask the question is a bad thing. Waiting until you're mid-pitch, as happened in his story, is scary as hell. In that case, defusing the situation and having the guy lower off a draw sounds like the best alternative. Having someone ask in advance so he's not going off half-cocked and trying to figure things out on his own is good.

When you're discussing leading and cleaning anchors with someone, that's the time to go over strategies for bailing. I think swapping out a biner for a draw is pretty straight-forward, and can be demonstrated with little risk. It's not some convoluted practice like the Texas rope trick, which I wouldn't generally show to someone just learning to lead. That said, people need to make their own evaluation and leave what they're comfortable with.

I am surprised no one has counseled the OP that if he is that green, he should stick to climbs within his limit, get better on them, and after he gets enough experience and knowledge that he doesn't need to pose these basic questions on RC, he can move up to more challenging climbs., and maybe, get himself into a predicament he now is able to extricate himself from without hurting himself or endangering others.

Why would you put somebody down who is trying to learn?, maybe becuase you were to buisy flexing pro ethics to realise it?. He opend with ''lets say i''.. as opposed to ''the other day i got stuck on the wall yall''.

And how do you go about learning basic knowledge withought asking basic questions?.

Kinde sure indoor inductions (at least in the uk) do not cover how to bail a sport route. This is more a failure on the ''professionals'' than the noobs, don't you think?.

There are very few bolts you can put your rope through without destroying it. You can do it with glue-ins for exanple, but the edges on a regular hanger are just too sharp.

It sounds as though you are saying it is OK to lower directly off a glue in. Please tell me you don't believe this.
That will do nothing but wear out the bolt, eventually making it unsafe to use. I'm sure you've been climbing long enough to witness the effect that repeated lowerings off of anchors has on the hardware.
Once a glue in has been worn down, it will need to be replaced. It is much more work intensive to replace a glue in than a conventional expansion bolt.

Do Not Lower Directly Off A Glue In Bolt! Use a bail biner.

You are correct for the UK, this is a suprising omission in in the syllabus in some ways but may reflect that in an indoor situation the need to bail off a route is unlikely, or at least retrieving a draw relatively painless.
For outdoor leading instruction the syllabus doesn´t ever mention sport climbing and is trad based so somewhere in between our sport noob is left in ignorance!

Maybe a result of how inherently, stubern, conservitave and old fashioned in style the uk climbing culture is?. The leader should never fall anyay, right? .

On the bigger picture, the lack of bolted routes in our country ontop of the rediculess trad ethics probably explains why the avg ability of a uk climber is horendesly low. That could be a reflcetion of how hard it would be to push into pro level climbing in this country. Thos who did do it.. lived next door to the few hot spots we do have (or made them hot spots). But even those climbers on the grand scale.. they are still leap years away from the level of climbers that are coming out of America, France, Spain and so on.

Dunno why i posted that, felt like talking.