Glossary of Climbing Terms - Z

Z

Z-clipping

Clipping into an anchor with the segment of rope from beneath the previous piece of protection, resulting in a potentially dangerous tangled configuration of the belay rope.

Zipper fall

A fall in which each piece of protection fails in turn. In some cases when the rope comes taut during a fall, the protection can fail from the bottom up, especially if the first piece was not placed to account for outward and/or upward force.

Z-pulley

Also Z-system. A particular configuration of rope, anchors, and pulleys typically used to extricate a climber after falling into a crevasse.