07/06/2026
Changeovers, you might not need to do one that often, but when you do you want it to go as smoothly as possible, I can say from personal experience it's energy sapping having to switch back several timers cos you've left your hand ascender too high on the rope.
You're ten metres down a rope when you realise you need to go back up.
Maybe the rope doesn't reach the floor. Maybe you've dropped something. Maybe the pitch below is flooded and you didn't know until you got low enough to hear it. Whatever the reason, you need to change direction.
On a staircase, you'd just turn around. On a rope, you can't. Your descender only goes down. Your ascenders only go up. You're rigged for one direction and you need the other.
That's what a changeover is. Switching from going down to going up, or the other way around, while you're hanging in mid-air.
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A friend of ours planned a through-trip. Down a big pitch, do some caving at the bottom, walk out of a horizontal entrance. They got up early. They drove a long way. They abseiled down the pitch.
Did we mention it's a big pitch? It's a big pitch.
They got to the bottom, headed off towards the exit, and found it flooded. Tried another route. Also flooded. So now the only way out was back up the really big pitch.
By this point, a waterfall had started coming down it.
They started climbing. Up and up and up, alone on the rope, water hammering down, unable to see or hear anyone. And partway up they hit a wall. Not a physical wall. Just the point where their body said: I can't do any more of this.
And they had a choice. Keep going and risk running out of energy completely, stranded on the rope, unable to go up or down, in a waterfall, with someone still waiting below who can't climb past them. Or use what energy they had left to do something about it.
They did a changeover. In the waterfall, in the dark, alone, at height. Switched from ascending to descending, abseiled back to the bottom, and told the person waiting there: I can't make it.
Their friends at the top called Cave Rescue. Cave Rescue came and hauled them up the pitch. The person at the bottom climbed out under their own steam.
Our friend went home tired, cold, and with a bruised ego. But alive. They went caving again many times after that. That changeover, on the worst day of their caving life, is the reason they got to have all the good ones that came after it.
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Another time. A group was on a pitch. The most experienced person rigged the rope and supervised from the top. A less experienced caver abseiled down, down, down, and then called up: "What do I do? I've run out of rope and I'm not at the bottom."
Without a changeover, that's a cave rescue. With one, it's a five minute problem. They switched from descending to ascending, climbed back up to the rigging point, and carried on with their day.
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Most caving trips don't involve a changeover. You abseil down, you climb back up, everything goes to plan.
But learning a changeover is a bit like learning an emergency stop when you're learning to drive. You don't do emergency stops on most journeys. You might go years without needing one. But when you need one, you really need one, and the time to learn is not the moment a child runs into the road.
The time you really need a changeover will be the worst possible time to be learning one for the first time.
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You don't have to be amazing at changeovers the moment you start doing SRT trips. You just need to know they exist and have a rough idea of how they work. Getting comfortable with them is something to aim for over time, not overnight. On training days, we break them into pieces and build up slowly, and nobody expects you to nail it first time.
A nice side effect: once you can do a changeover, rebelays get much easier. The hand movements overlap. But that's a bonus. The real reason we teach changeovers is those two stories. If you're on a rope and you need to go the other direction, you need to be able to.
