I finally got my climbing line to stop tangling on every single job

I've been fighting with my climbing line for months now. Every time I'd throw it up into a big oak or maple, it would twist up into a mess and I'd waste like 10 minutes just untangling it before I could even start my ascent. Last week I was working a removal on a 60 foot silver maple in Nashville and I just got fed up. I remembered an old guy at a ISA conference mentioning to try a different hitch cord configuration, so I swapped my usual 8mm beeline for a 10mm yale and ran a Michoacan instead of my standard VT. Dude, it was night and day. The line ran so smooth through the friction hitch on that first throw and I climbed the whole tree without a single tangle. Has anyone else had luck with the Michoacan over a VT on a 10mm cord?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_lucas22h ago

Hang on, are you saying the Michoacan hitch on a 10mm cord fixed your tangling issue? Because tangling usually comes from the way you store or break in your line, not the hitch knot itself. The Michoacan is a solid knot for sure, but it’s more about grip and adjustability than stopping twists in your climbing line. If your line was tangling bad on every throw, it might have been your rope memory or how you were coiling it. I switched to a 10mm yale a while back and that rope is stiff, it doesn’t tangle easy no matter what hitch I run. So maybe the thicker rope did the heavy lifting, not the knot change.

sean_torres7121h ago

Yeah man I had the same headache till I swapped to a stiffer 10mm line and just started daisy coiling it every time.

grantp2817h ago

Wait, so you're saying the rope stiffness was the real fix and the hitch just happened to come along for the ride? That honestly makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. I always figured tangling was just a bad knot or user error, but you got me thinking about rope memory. My old 8mm beeline was super floppy and would hold every twist I put into it, even after I daisy coiled it perfectly. The new 10mm yale I switched to is way stiffer, so it probably just doesn't hold those kinks as bad no matter what hitch I tie. I bet that's the whole secret right there, the thicker rope is just harder to mess up with twists. I never really thought about rope stiffness being the main fix, I just assumed it was all the knot doing the work. Good catch man, that changes how I'm gonna look at my gear setup from now on.