Intro to Harnesses

A harness should be one of those items of gear that you forget about until you have a sudden inclination to use it, then you may be hanging in it for hours or a few seconds as you are lowered to the ground, therefore before choosing your harness you have to decide its intended purpose: sending, sport, trad, big wall or an all rounder. Some of these categories are mutually exclusive: one can’t have an uber light weight red-pointing harness that also doubles as your big wall harness as could be sitting in for a week- uncomfortable!

I have broken the 4 categories separately however there are common themes, primarily comfort. Even for the harness that is sat in for one minute a degree of comfort is needed otherwise one would simply use a sling around the waist. Very few climbers have more then one actively used harnesses in their gear cupboard mainly because few people see the value in a sending harness enough to buy one, or are willing to shell out more $ for the luxury of a trad and a sport harness. As a result the chances are harness you choose is likely to be used for all your climbing adventures. I suspect that the harness manufacturers realize this and so produce more all purpose models then the most popular disciplines: sport and trad. Big wall is so specialist that i would rather avoid discussing them here- if you are doing that stuff you should know these sorts of things already: Similar story for the sending harness except i will give a brief ideal opinion here.

To be continued...