LOWER BLUE MOUNTAINS – 14 December 2025
When watching the 2011 movie Sanctum and seeing (actor) caver take out a knife to cut her hair free of her descender, almost everyone I know who watched the movie joined the behind the scene actor yelling out “no, no don’t do it”. And then when she fell to her death I thought, “yep you should have done what you were told to do – don’t put a knife near a rope”. So, when I facilitated a workshop on “cutting the rope”, it was a little nerve-wracking.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been nervous, after all we had a caving guru to walk us through the technique safely.
So, why were we even cutting ropes in the first place? In the old days, it was just assumed that new cavers would acquire the skills by osmosis over a number of years. These days, there are too many adventure options, and the younger generation don’t hang around long enough to acquire the skills by osmosis.
To overcome this, 3 years ago, a couple of highly skilled cavers and I (not so highly skilled LOL) invited potential future leaders to participate in an intensive program to up-skill so that they’ll have the skills to lead caving trips competently.
Today was the last workshop for 2025 where those who were now ready to lead trips were introduced to a third “team self rescue” technique, a “very scary” way of rescuing someone who was (for some reason) stuck on a rope in a cave.
First Onni and Marty went to the top of the cliff and set up a couple of pitches that we’d use, rigging the pitches was part of the curriculum that they learnt 2 years ago and have been practicing ever since.
Cave rescue gugu, Al, kindly took time out of his very busy life to show us how to “pick off” a casualty from the rope by cutting the rope (Al – far right of the photo)!
There are a number of ways to “pick off” a casualty, the “croll to croll” and “counterbalance” techniques and most of the participants had given these techniques a go, but they are very complicated and take a lot of time. The “cutting the rope” pick off is much quicker.
There are two potential scenarios here, (1) descending to the casualty on a second rope or (2) prussiking up to the casualty. Al demonstrated the first scenario by approaching Shiva from above using a second rope (and then they’d descend on the second rope).
Then, Al attached Shiva to himself and eventually cut the rope that Shiva was on.
Al then was able to descend the rope with Shiva hanging from his harness.
Everyone then had a go at doing the technique under Al’s supervision (Nick and Adrian).
The next technique was approaching the casualty from the bottom, so Al had to prussik up to Shiva and then pass her, attach Shiva to himself and then cut the rope. My recollection is with the second demonstration, the end of the rope was transported up and then Shiva’s hand ascender was used to attach the end of the rope and then descend down that rope.
Zee and Cindy, Cindy who weighs next to nothing also got to “rescue” others who probably weighed 3 times as much as Cindy and she had no trouble abseiling down with them.
There were seven participants, and everyone got to be both the rescuer and the casualty and were able to practice on numerous occasions. It was agreed that this technique was definitely better than the Croll to Croll or counterbalance method, however, they all decided that different techniques could be used for different scenarios.
We used an old Bluewater rope that I was happy to cut up (too old to use out in the field), we probably went through 25m of the 50m rope LOL. Thanks Cindy for holding the rope for the photo.
Big thanks to Al, we learned more than just the pick off techniques, Al is a wealth of knowledge (he’s often quoted on overseas books about cave rescue and he’s caved in all the well-known and unknown caves internationally). Also, thanks to the participants, without your attendance, the workshop wouldn’t have gone ahead. So, a new 2026 program is in the works, looking forward to seeing some new up and coming leaders to join us!