Attaching Uplines To Your Harness

There are many different ways to attach your upline to your harness. To some extent, there are broad guidelines that suggest "right" and "wrong" ways to do this – if you're going to do it the "wrong" way, at least be thoughtful about why you've made that choice. In general terms, you want to try to attach a hanger in such a way that it evenly loads the entire harness (rather than loading on just a strand or two). Loading in this way is safer, and also tends to be more comfortable. The pictures below show this:

Perhaps I could do better than this...

You can see that the upline here is attached to the single crosspiece of the chest harness. This loads it on just 2 strands of rope (which happens to be hemp, but this would be an even worse idea with jute rope). In the pic, I attached around the "stem" of the chest harness by tying an overhand knot, and then going up to the point and back through the bight of the rope. This creates a weak single point of failure, and also doesn't allow for a good pulley system to raise or lower yourself. Additionally, I've tied off at the ring using a spiral technique that, when done properly (by going back through the center of the bundle after spiraling around), can tend to jam under load... or when done improperly (by not going back through the bundle but just wrapping and then half hitching around the entire bundle) is quite insecure and failure-prone. 

Ah! Much better!

I have created a hanger that loads the entire chest harness (8 total strands of rope around my chest) instead of only loading the center stem (2 strands). I used a carabiner to attach to my hanger, which gives me decreased friction (and decreased rope wear) for a pulley. I tied off to the bottom carabiner, where it will be easy for me to reach, using a supermunter, two half hitches, and then some slipped/doubled up half hitches to use up extra lines – I will be able to easily untie this, even under load, with just one hand. More details on tying off uplinks can be found on the video tutorials page, as well as this article!