pine sap & rope

Hello all,
long time climber, but new to this site.
I have climbed and removed a lot of pines and spruces over the last couple of week's. My climbing line, as well as my buckstrap are totally goobered up with pine sap. I have heard about but never tried running a rope through baby powder. Anyone ever tried this? Seems like it would just make the rope slippery as opposed to eliminating the effects of sap on a rope.

I don't know about the baby powder, you might want to try using a false crotch to keep your climbing line from getting sapped up.

When you say buck strap, do you mean a regular old fashioned leather pole strap or are you referring to a lanyard. Buckstrap on this site means taking some heat for not being up to date and being a hack, old schooler ect. ect. Welcome to the site, stick around you will get educated real quick.

If your using a regular rope lanyard an outer covering or sheath can be fabricated to keep it from getting gummed up.

Ropes can also be washed to get rid of sap. Plenty of threads on this subject, just do a search on the subject.

Larry

Sorry about poor use of terminology, as a buckstrap (the term I was weened on) I use an 8' safety blue with a prussic & micro pulley, alluminum snaps on each end.
I used a (friction saver) once in trimming a white pine. when I was on the ground I could not retrieve the false crotch. I reclimbed the tree to retrieve the false crotch by hand.
The strap itself had worked it's way so far through the cambium that I had to pry it out with a screwdriver.
Kind of defeets the the whole intention of a false crotch, dont ya think...

hehe aint it a bummer when that happens.
thing with a cambium saver is you cant just go sticking it anywhere......need to put it in a decent crotch which it can come away from freely.
if im coming down from a big tree and my anchor point is questionable i'll sometimes re-anchor half way down.

I never heard of a FC working it's way into a tree like the way your describing.

Was it a rope type FC ?? or one made out of a flat strap type of material.

Crotch selection is key when using a FC, plus some practice in getting it out, like anything else one has to tweak and play with new techniques.

You must have been working it pretty hard to do that, but I could see it happening on a White Pine, they are pretty soft, not to mention gummy.

I would try it again myself, hate to see a good line get ate up by an evergreen tree.

Larry

I've been using alot of Zep Cherry Bomb lately to get rid of pitch. Diluted kinda stiff in the washer.

And the ropes smell good, too.

Gojo or any of those waterless handcleaners work well on pitch.

took down a corsican pine last week sap over everything