Planning Outdoor Suspensions
A few months back, during the APP conference, a few of us led a class about suspension rigging. We broke it down such that Allen handled the introduction and the physics of rigging, I went into details of structural rigging, and Emrys gave a great talk on planning outdoor suspensions, with S2B wrapping it all up with professional entertainment rigging stories and images. Overall the class went exceptionally well, and we our instructors worked great together. Em’s piece in particular was sort of thrown together, out of left field and ended up being immensely useful and his presence was heartfelt and sincere.
All that talking about planning brought up a couple of memories of times when ihung forgot some crucial piece and had to improvise, which is not something you want to have to do with suspensions. Like one time I went out into the woods in Michigan to hang myself from my knees and forgot to bring gloves… but that’s an entirely different story. Recently, one of ihung’s very own submitted a pair of images from a knee suspension we did a few years back. It wasn’t until we were at the location, had all the structural rigging in place, and had inserted the hooks that we realized we didn’t have any rigs with us. Uh oh. Here, we had Nate with 6 hooks in his knees and no rig to put him on. Nate and I discussed options and decided to just rig through a carabiner (possibly one per knee) and leave the rigging lines long enough to relax the angles of the hooks and he’d be fine. I’d had a little experience with rigging suspensions without a rigging plate, but was not terribly confident in doing it at this point in time, at least not with knees (notoriously finicky) or with more than four hooks, but Nate and I share a mutual trust and respect and so we went with it.
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Despite being boneheads and forgetting the rigging plate, the night was a roaring success for Nate. To bring this back to the APP class though, Emrys’ recommendations were very common sense, but still needed to be said. If you missed the class, I’m sorry as it was a good one, but the parts that stuck with me were as follows:
- Scout the location beforehand
- Plan what to take in and double check it before heading in
- Don’t bring too much, but don’t come up short either
- Remember that the people who suspend probably won’t be in the best of shape for carrying stuff out, or even climbing out, depending on what sort of location you use
- Test the location a few days before you plan to use it. Better to hit snags with plenty of time to rethink or replan it than to hit them the day of
Those are some of the many useful hints for outdoor suspensions that Emrys gave. If you ever have a chance to take any of the various suspension classes/lectures that are offered, even if you aren’t actively involved in suspensions, they are generally very informative, as well as help to solidify the bonds in our suspension community. With that, here’s another picture of Nate from that night.
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That was a good night. The level of trust I have in my fellow ihung members borders on the insane and is something everyone should have with the people that you work with. I thank every day that I have people like jason, drew, dave, mike, adrian, erin and all the others to do this with.