It Works Until It Doesn’t: Why We Rig for Contingency Every Time!
We got an email from Stan, who’s taken our Technical, Advanced, and Rescue courses over the past couple of seasons. He was canyoneering in Sedona’s Spyhole Canyon with his wife Mel and a couple of their kids.
Spyhole’s final rappel drops through a narrow slot to a ledge, then continues another hundred feet down into a wide-open cave. To keep the descent simple for his kids, Stan ran a single rope from the anchor tree straight past that mid-point ledge, skipping the usual transition. As the last person down, Stan planned to switch over to the canyon’s recommended bolted anchor for a clean rope pull — good judgment on its own.
Due to this plan, Stan was setting the rappel up for his wife, Mel, to rappel first to be at the bottom to belay the kids coming down. Off the tree anchor on top, Stan started to tie a standard figure-8 into the end of the rope and clip to the anchor as a fixed line that he would then remove before descending himself, planning to deal with the changeover for the short drop to the bolts and the clean pull when he was ready to go down. Then he caught himself — as he put it in his email: “I literally heard your voice [Jared] in my head saying ‘Always rig for contingency!’ and so I did.” Stan rigged a proper contingency anchor instead — the kind of setup that gives you a way to lower someone if something goes wrong mid-rappel, rather than leaving the rappeler stuck if something does go wrong.
A few minutes later, it went wrong. As Mel was rappelling, her hair fell out of her ponytail and became entangled in her rappel device. Because the contingency anchor was already in place, she was able to be lowered down safely, and the moment passed in seconds instead of becoming an emergency.
Why we teach it this way
Here’s how Jared put it after hearing the full story, replying back to Stan’s email:
“In all my years of rigging I have only had to lower a handful of times in 20+ years, but those few times it was sure nice to have. A lot of people go through canyons and never have an issue, and as such always expect it to go right and never plan for the contingency — but the moment it doesn’t go right is when you’ll wish you did. It doesn’t take up much more time to rig it than any other rigging.”
That’s the whole principle. Most rappels go fine without a contingency plan. That’s exactly what makes it easy to skip — nothing bad happens, so it feels unnecessary, right up until the one time it isn’t. By then, there’s no time left to add it.
It’s a small habit that costs almost nothing to build in, and it only has to be there once for it to matter.
Why “I Already Know How to Rappel” Isn’t the Same as Trained
Stan isn’t new to canyoneering. He’d completed our Technical, Advanced, and Rescue courses before this trip — and contingency rigging isn’t advanced material we save for our best students. It’s one of the basic skills we teach in the very first course, the entry-level Technical Canyoneering Course, because we consider it fundamental, not optional. By his own account, on an ordinary family outing with nobody checking his work, Stan nearly skipped a skill he’d known since day one.
This is the concept we go through and attack during our courses — closing the gap between whether you can execute a technique on demand, and whether it still happens when you’re distracted or too comfortable in the moment, which is most of the time you’re actually out there. If you’ve rappelled before and think that’s enough, it’s worth sitting with the fact that someone who’d had this exact skill drilled in from his very first course nearly skipped it anyway. Knowing how to rig a contingency anchor and having it happen automatically, without thinking, are two different things.
If Stan hadn’t caught himself before Mel started down, our Rescue course covers the next skill up — converting an already-tied knot into a contingency anchor even after someone’s already weighting the rope. But the version every canyoneer needs, guided or not, is the basic one: rig for contingency before anyone gets on the rope, every time. That’s taught on day one.
Thanks to Stan and Mel for sharing their story — and for putting the training to good use when it counted.
P.S. After posting this story on our Socials, We got this response back from someone who runs canyons a lot in this area and is familiar with this canyon and the drop: