Weekend Whipper: Yikes! This Draw Unclips Itself—and No, It’s Not Back-Clipped.

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If you haven’t heard of “gate flutter,” you’re in the majority. This incident with a carabiner is rare to experience, and even rarer to catch on film.

But when one climber falls on Singularity (5.12b), an 85-foot sport route in Yangshuo, China, we see it up close.

Everything starts out normally. The climber is about two-thirds up the limestone route when he takes a hefty lead fall, landing in a soft arc about 30 feet below his fifth and final bolt. Physically, he’s completely fine. But when he lands face-to-face with his third quickdraw, he notices that it’s swinging in the air, ropeless.

A zoomed-in replay shows that the draw wasn’t back-clipped. Before he fell, the solid gate draw was closed around the rope. Then, during the fall, the rope bounced out—which means the carabiner’s gate must have opened on its own.

What happened?

A little disturbed, I hunted around the Internet for answers until I found a WeighMyRack blog post about gate flutter. According to the blog post, gate flutter happens when a carabiner’s spine smacks against the rock. At the right angle, and with enough force, this impact can cause the carabiner’s gate to bounce open. In the worst-case scenario, the rope could slide out of the quickdraw’s gate and render it useless to a falling climber.

Jeff Jaramillo, WeighMyRack’s Head of Gear Education and Outreach, confirms my suspicions. “Absolutely, I think what’s happening here is gate flutter,” he says over Zoom, “when a carabiner slaps up against the rock or a surface of some kind and the gate comes open temporarily. This is probably one of the best-filmed instances of this that I’ve seen.”

We move frame-by-frame through the video. Jaramillo points out that when the climber falls, he pulls at least twenty feet of rope quickly through the system. At high velocity, the friction of the rope pulls the bottom of the draw above the bolt. Any properly-clipped draw will be back-clipped if it’s flipped upside down, and that’s exactly what happens. However, this wouldn’t be an issue without this second part: the gate flutter. As it’s being flipped, the top of the draw hits the rock and its gate jumps open for a split-second. That’s just enough for the rope, which is still moving, to slip through.

According to Jaramillo, most of the people who know about gate flutter think that only solid gates, like the carabiner in this video, can experience it, but that’s not true: wiregates can still flutter open. “You’re probably going to see it more with the solid gate just because of the mass of the gate. There’s more potential energy that can be built up with more mass. As the carabiner swings over and stops, there’s more mass that needs to go somewhere,” he says. However, gate flutter has been shown to still happen with wiregates.

As a trad climber, I’m used to the idea that a properly-clipped bolt is the most bomber protection available. And while this climber had two other bolts above him, the idea that a healthy, perfectly-clipped bolt could become useless in an instant is an uncomfortable thought. So how can people avoid this?

Tips for Avoiding Gate Flutter

“Unless you’re the person who bolted this route, I don’t think there’s much you can do to avoid where this carabiner hit that wall,” says Jaramillo, “short of maybe choosing a shorter or longer draw. Longer draws have a greater chance of flopping around.” He recommends that route developers avoid placing bolts directly below tufas or bulges, where a carabiner is most likely to flip up and hit the rock.

Taking shorter falls, however, will minimize the risk of having the rope come unclipped. “If this fall wasn’t so big, there wouldn’t be that much rope moving through the quickdraw, so the quickdraw wouldn’t have had time to get all the way upside down like it did,” he says.

Another precaution is using a locking carabiner at the end of the draw. This could take significant time and energy on lead, but would ensure the rope doesn’t escape.

Thankfully, gate flutter is still incredibly rare. “[Whether you’re] sport climbing or trad climbing, you’re in a system, and there are multiple pieces for a reason,” says Jaramillo, “so if you’re worried about one particular piece coming undone, I would say the pieces lower to the ground that could result in a groundfall would be the ones that I’d be worried about. That’s why I’m seeing more people locking the first or second draw if that’s a concern for them.”

Happy Friday, and be safe out there this weekend.

Original video credit: Mou Ding

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