1. The basics

The first thing you need is to become a climber. Your mat would be meaningless otherwise. After you’ve become an accomplished climber and your rope has seen plenty of redpoints, projects, multipitches and abseils your rope will slowly age until the point of retirement.

According to Pit Schubert, a climbing rope that sees general use will last 3-5 years, and even if you don’t use it often after 10 years it will still become unsafe. After a specific number of big falls or one factor 2 fall, you should also retire it.

If you want the optional therapy part of this tutorial, you need to have one or several life threatening experiences with your rope. Do this by being bold, adventurous and a little carefree. Be careful not to overdo it and die. If you die, your rope will be given to your surviving family and chances are they’ll just keep in a closet and cry when they think of it. At any rate, it won’t become a welcome mat.

2. What you’ll need

Once your rope is unsafe to climb on or you have accumulated enough trauma it’s time to get to work on your welcome mat. The process is very involved, so make sure you have time and the emotional headroom to deal with intense emotions. A clear sign that you are doing this right is your post-traumatic stress disorder being triggered.

What will you need?

  • A retired climbing rope
  • Time

You might also need a knife and a lighter in case you need to cut the rope and terminate the ends to stop them from unravelling, but what I’m trying to convey here is that this mat doesn’t require any gluing, jigs, templates or other things. The only sewing I did were a couple of stitches to the ends of the rope at the end.

3. Getting to work

And old Buddhist saying says that there are many mountains and many ways to reach the top of a mountain. The particular mountain I chose for this was this really big knot: The Ocean Plait Mat. I also took some inspiration from fellow climber Emily X, who was kind enough to put up a much better and more useful tutorial here.

I hope the symbolism in choosing a mat that is also a knot is not lost on you. A climbing rope’s life is about the knots it makes along the way. Every climb it will partake in will start with a figure eight when you tie into it, the occasional Munter hitch to abseil down with just a carabiner, clove hitches to secure you when you finish a pitch, double fisherman’s when joining it with another rope for a very long abseil and overhand knots to stop you from sliding off the ends of it and dying. It’s fitting that the last thing you will do with your rope is a very large and complicated knot.

The first thing you need to do is wash your rope. Especially if you do this for therapy, there’s a chance the rope is stained with blood or other bodily fluids and you don’t really want that in a welcome mat. If you’re one of the lucky ones and your rope is free from any DNA it’s probably dirty from all the aluminium oxide dust it accumulates from years of friction onto anchors, belay devices and carabiners. So wash it. If this were an active climbing rope there would be a valid argument of how to do this, but since this will now be a welcome mat you can just toss it in the washing machine with whatever soap you have at hand.

Now the therapy really begins. Untangle the rope and feed into the ground just like you would at the beginning of a climb. Only this time you’ll be standing next to your washing machine instead of at the base of an exciting climb. You won’t be inspired or dazed by the sheerness and height of a sexy rock formation if you look up, you’ll just be weirded out. All in the name of mental health.

Your next step is a long and tedious one and the meat and potatoes of this therapy. You will lay your basic knot down with the short end of the rope and then proceed to heroically weave your ~60m of rope through it.

While feeding your entire length of rope through the intricacies of the the knot you will think of the times you handled the rope like this to find the middle of the rope in an abseil, it will remind you of the times you prepared your rope to throw it of a ledge. You’ll relive your multipitch climbs and how you pulled the slack of the rope from above while the carabiners in the anchor clanked against each other. And if there ever was an accident where a rope was involved, you’ll be taken straight back to it. Remember to take a moment to breathe and remind yourself that you are not standing in a ledge held by a 10mm rope clipped to an equalized anchor made up of 2 camming devices and a #5 hex. Remember that the actual event happened a long time ago and try to get back to reality. Once you come back don’t fret, just keep calmly working the rope into itself. This is your job now. Visually follow the knot and figure out where the rope goes, get the tip of the long end through the weavings of the knot and feed 50 meters of rope on the floor of your living room to tighten it. Over and over again.

Here's the rug in al its glory The final result

You will do this for hours. You will curse your rope and this entire endeavour. You will get tired, worn down and as you do, a realisation will slowly dawn on you. You will place this welcome mat in your entrance and see it every day. Will you relive this? Yes. Will you enjoy it? No. Will it trigger your PTSD? Only if you do it right.

Make no mistake, if you’re lucky enough to be alive you are going to live with what you’ve done, the decisions and mistakes you’ve made will haunt you no matter what. So… why not get a welcome mat out of it?

Specifications

Finally, for my engineering nerdiness I will give some specs on my actual welcome mat.

  • This is a 60m Mammut Apex 10.5mm dynamic rope.
  • The mat is 50x90cm long approximately.
  • The knot is an Ocean Plait Mat.
  • It weighs 4.5kg, quite hefty for a mat!

And to sum it all up, some memorable climbs with this rope?

  • Timewave Zero, a 600m sport climb in Potrero Chico.
  • The Chief, via St. Vitus’ Dance a 300m trad climb with an awkward off-width in Squamish.
  • Some very interesting slab climbs in El Tajo en BC.
  • Peña de Bernal, a 300m sport climb in Queretaro.
  • El Pico Independencia, the tallest peak in la Huasteca in MTY.
  • Many classic routes in El Chico Hidalgo, amongst others.

Enjoy!