The course every climber should take and hopes never to use. One day learning to escape a belay, reach an injured partner and get both of you down — because 100 metres up, nobody is coming quickly.
Book NowYou're belaying your partner up the third pitch. A block comes down and hits them. They're hanging on the rope below you, not moving, and the whole weight of the system is on your belay device. What do you do in the next three minutes?
Almost every climber, asked that question honestly, doesn't know. Not because they're careless — because nothing in normal climbing teaches it. You can lead confidently for years, build perfect anchors, climb hard routes, and still have no idea how to get your hands free of a loaded rope, let alone reach someone who can't help themselves.
That's the gap this day fills. It isn't about heroics or big mountain rescue; it's about a small set of manoeuvres, done with the gear already on your harness, that turn a genuine emergency into a manageable problem. Escaping a loaded belay. Getting up or down the rope to your partner. Transferring their weight to the anchor. Lowering both of you to the ground.
These are not complicated techniques. They're fiddly ones, made of a handful of hitches combined in the right order, and they cannot be learned from a book or a video because the moment you're doing it for real your hands will be shaking and the sequence has to already be in them. So we spend the entire day with rope in your hands, repeating each system until it's boring. Reading about a belay escape and being able to do one are completely different things.
We start with a full demonstration — a complete rescue, start to finish, so you see where every piece fits — and then break it into parts and drill each one until you can do it unaided.
Prusik, klemheist and autoblock: how each grips, when to use which, and how to tie them one-handed with cold fingers. Everything else in the day is built on these.
The single most valuable knot in rescue: it lets you tie off a loaded rope and then release it again under load. If you take one thing home from the day, this is it.
Moving your partner's weight off your body and onto the anchor, safely and in the right order, so your hands come free.
The cornerstone skill: getting out of a loaded belay system entirely, whether you're belaying from your harness or from the anchor. Practised until you can do it without thinking about the sequence.
Prusiking up to a leader who's fallen and can't move: standard technique, with an extended belay device, and improvised methods for when you're short of gear.
Getting down to a partner hanging below you, on a rope that's already loaded — including the counterbalance rappel, which is the most useful trick in the whole day.
Releasing a plaquette or guide-mode belay device with your partner's weight on it — awkward, essential, and something most climbers have never tried.
Controlled lowering from the anchor, including what to do when the rope isn't long enough and you have to do it in stages.
Descending with an injured partner attached to you: the rigging, the friction, and how it actually feels to move two people down a rope.
Assisted hoists and simple mechanical advantage, so you can help a second past a section they physically can't climb — the most commonly used rescue skill of all, and the least dramatic.
Bailing from partway up a route when the weather turns or something goes wrong: downclimbing, lowering, and getting your gear back.
Full scenarios at the end of the day, where you run a complete rescue yourself from the first moment to the ground.
This is the course where people are most worried about looking stupid — and that worry is the main reason capable climbers never book it. So it's worth being clear about how the day runs.
You will get things wrong. Repeatedly. You'll tie a munter backwards, forget which end of the rope you're loading, and build the same system three or four times before it sticks. That is not a sign you're doing badly; it's exactly what learning these skills looks like, for everyone, including the guides who teach them.
José runs this day the way he runs everything — slowly, and without ever making anyone feel behind. There's no clock, no comparison with the rest of the group, and no question too basic to ask twice. If a system takes you five attempts, you get five attempts. People consistently say afterwards that they'd expected to feel out of their depth and instead just felt looked after, which is precisely the point: nobody learns anything technical while they're embarrassed.
Escape a loaded belay, ascend or descend a rope to reach your partner, transfer their weight to an anchor, lower them, rappel with them, and haul a second past a hard move — using only the gear you already carry. You'll also know, honestly, which of these you can do smoothly and which need practising at the crag before you'd rely on them.
Self-rescue techniques are not magic, and a good course says so. Several of them depend on conditions you might not have — you can't descend safely if there's nowhere to build a reliable anchor, and you can't rope-solo up to an injured leader without gear to build an upward-pulling anchor. Part of the day is learning to recognise which situations you can solve yourself and which ones mean calling for help immediately. Knowing the difference is a rescue skill in itself.
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Whether you need this course, what a day of it feels like, and the honest limits of what self-rescue can do.
If you're not yet climbing multi-pitch, start with the Multi-Pitch Course — self-rescue builds directly on it. If you want to protect your own routes and open up unbolted terrain, the Trad Climbing Course is the other natural step.
