How To Use A Muenter Hitch To Lower A Climber
An Elite Swiftwater Instructor Demonstrates the use of a Muenter hitch in high angle rescue.
Step 1: Muenter Hitch
Hi, I'm Jim Taylor with Appalachian Mountain Guides and today we're going to be talking about the muenter hitch. The muenter hitch is commonly used by climbing guides for both belaying purposes and personal self-rescue and it's also found in the vertical rescue world, heavy technical rope rescue. It can be used to belay. It can also be used for a load-releasing hitch, for tying off Stoke's litters, and many other different applications.
Step 2: Tying the Muenter Hitch
One of the first things you want to do, when tying your muenter hitch is locate the loaded end, the end that's going to be tied into the litter, or into the climber. We're then going to take the rope, clip it into the carabineer, and we're actually going to tie this hitch directly on the carabineer itself. Here's my load bearing strand going down to my climber below, my brake strand over here on the left-hand side. With the brake strand, I'm going to create a loop, and if you'll look closely, you'll notice that the brake is behind the load, meaning that, the strand coming behind is what's going to my loose pile of rope, my leftover. I'm then going to take this loop and simply clip it into the carabineer, making sure to lock the carabineer itself and I now have a good muenter hitch.
Step 3: How the Muenter Hitch Works
It works for both taking in rope, when you want to lower somebody, the knot will merely rock over, and you can lower somebody as well. One of the main things with the muenter hitch is making sure you use an HMS carabineer, also commonly known as a carabineer. The wide head was specifically built for the muenter hitch and if you try to use the muenter hitch on a much smaller carabineer, you'll find that it won't rotate over, or rock back and forth or feed smoothly.
Step 4: Good Attributes
Yet another positive attribute of the muenter hitch is that it can easily be tied off while it's under a load. Typically most people will use a mule knot to tie off their muenter hitch, and it's very similar to the muenter hitch itself in that we're going to make a loop with the brake strand behind the load, come around the load-bearing strand, and feed a bite through the loop that we created. This will give us the mule knot, cinches off our muenter hitch, and typically we want to back this up with yet another knot, a simple overhand, just for safety's sake, and this is commonly referred to as a safety knot. Now we're in a hands-free position. We could have somebody hanging over a cliff edge, feel free to go and work on other things.
The other nice attribute to this is that, even under a load, and a fairly heavy load, it can be easily released just by untying the overhand, working the mule knot down until our loop is fairly small, then I'm going to take both hands, apply them to the brake strand and snap it back into place, into the braking position.
Step 5: Lowering A Climber
Now we're going to demonstrate how to use the muenter hitch to lower either a climber or a rescuer down over the edge of a cliff. One of the key things we want to do when using the muenter hitch to lower somebody is to back it up, preferably with an auto-block backup.
Step 6: Prussic Loop
The easiest way to do that is to take a Prussic loop, clip a carabineer into your harness, into the belay loop, then put your auto-block on, and this can give you a hands-free backup, should anything happen to you while lowering somebody. Make sure that it's set, everything looks good and is working well, and now we're ready to lower our climber or rescuer, over the edge of a cliff. Ok, so ahead and move on back to the edge Kate and go ahead an begin to put your full weight onto the system, I'm going to lower you nicely over the edge. There you go.
Step 7: Auto-Block
And one of the nice things about the auto-block is, if you were to be incapacitated in any way and let go of the braking strand, it automatically binds, giving you a hands-off brake that easily releasable when you want to continue lowering your climber down.
