Climbers care a lot about their ropes because their lives literally depend on them. And while there’s been tremendous progress in climbing rope tech since people first started falling onto hemp fibers, there are still accidents where rope failure is to blame.
This long, detailed, and interesting video from [Hard is Easy] follows him on a trip to the Mammut test labs to see what’s up with their relatively new abrasion-resistant rope. His visit was full of cool engineering test rigs that pushed the ropes to breaking in numerous ways. If you climb, though, be warned that some of the scenes are gut-wrenchingly fascinating, watching the ropes fail horribly in well-shot slow-mo.
