Hard to tell what all that means, but it certainly looks difficult.
— Margaret Hovell
Hi, Mom. Well, if you are interested to know about finger locks and liebacks... Sometimes rocks have thin vertical cracks in the rock that accommodate just your fingers but not your whole hand. This is called a finger crack. Sometimes that crack opens up wider deeper into the rock than at the surface. Additionally the width of the crack on the surface almost always varies a bit, forming natural constrictions. A finger lock is achieved by finding a place where the crack is relatively wide at the surface and gets narrower just below. By sliding 2 to 4 of your fingers in all the way to the knuckle and then taking advantage of the fact that your fingers tend to be a bit narrower near the knuckle than along the first proximal joint of the fingers you can move you whole hand down into the narrower section of the crack. Now your fingers are "locked" into the crack and can't come out without first moving your hand back up the crack. It sounds uncomfortable, but it's really not, especially if you push your finger tips against the inside wall of the crack, which creates a little camming force and also flexes your fingers, which tightens up the joints and prevents the feeling that your fingers might be dislocated and prevents the rock from pinching against a bone or nerve as might happen in a completely relaxed finger. I guess that makes it sound even more horrible, but with a little practice it's really quite comfortable and feels very secure, much more so than a normal handhold. Liebacking is a bit easier to explain: when a crack or a flake protrudes from the wall you can grab onto it and use opposing forces to walk your feet up the wall. The closer your feet are to your hands, the more secure it feels, but more strenuous. The lower your feet are, the greater chance that they might slip, as you reduce the amount of opposing force you can apply. Difficult liebacking is achieved by balancing these two goals so you don't slip but don't wear yourself out either.
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Hard to tell what all that means, but it certainly looks difficult.
— Margaret Hovell
Hi, Mom. Well, if you are interested to know about finger locks and liebacks... Sometimes rocks have thin vertical cracks in the rock that accommodate just your fingers but not your whole hand. This is called a finger crack. Sometimes that crack opens up wider deeper into the rock than at the surface. Additionally the width of the crack on the surface almost always varies a bit, forming natural constrictions. A finger lock is achieved by finding a place where the crack is relatively wide at the surface and gets narrower just below. By sliding 2 to 4 of your fingers in all the way to the knuckle and then taking advantage of the fact that your fingers tend to be a bit narrower near the knuckle than along the first proximal joint of the fingers you can move you whole hand down into the narrower section of the crack. Now your fingers are "locked" into the crack and can't come out without first moving your hand back up the crack. It sounds uncomfortable, but it's really not, especially if you push your finger tips against the inside wall of the crack, which creates a little camming force and also flexes your fingers, which tightens up the joints and prevents the feeling that your fingers might be dislocated and prevents the rock from pinching against a bone or nerve as might happen in a completely relaxed finger. I guess that makes it sound even more horrible, but with a little practice it's really quite comfortable and feels very secure, much more so than a normal handhold. Liebacking is a bit easier to explain: when a crack or a flake protrudes from the wall you can grab onto it and use opposing forces to walk your feet up the wall. The closer your feet are to your hands, the more secure it feels, but more strenuous. The lower your feet are, the greater chance that they might slip, as you reduce the amount of opposing force you can apply. Difficult liebacking is achieved by balancing these two goals so you don't slip but don't wear yourself out either.
— John Hovell