How to climb the border fence.

Suppose you were in Mexico visiting friends or climbing El Potrero Chico and needed to get home but Trump sealed the border during one of his rants. Suppose you wanted to move north for whatever reason and found a fence in your way. I have seen the border fence muchos times and only now thought of it as a climbing project.

This is my thoughts. There’s a good chance you will come to either a chain link or iron fence and it might be tall enough to make it suck if you fall from the top. If you have a harness, a lanyard, a carabiner, a scrap of carpet, and two prusiks, you can climb that cabrón easier and safer. If you know how to tie a hand harness, your trip got cheaper.

It’s a public service announcement.

You will need five meters of good rope to make a harness. Three, two meter lengths of 8 mm cord to make one lanyard and two prusiks. You will also need a chunk of carpet because they keep putting really sharp stuff on top the fence.

The harness can be a hand tied harness. I learned to tie these from Freedom of the Hills, the bible of climbing. 

To make a hand harness, first tie a loop about 1.5 meters from the end of the 5 meter rope. The loop should be fit over your thigh, snug but not uncomfortable. About 15 cm up rope, tie another loop. Put both legs in the loops like pants and wrap the ends around your waist and tie them together with a square knot. 

.

Next, take a two meter strand of 8 mm cord and make a small loop on the end. Run the cord through both rope between your legs AND the strand around your waist and run the cord through the loop. Make another loop on the end of the rope and attach a carabiner. This is used to clip into chain link or clip to spikes on the iron fence. This will allow you to hang on the harness while you put the carpet on the top and while you climb over. 

Climb a chain link by sticking your toes and fingers in the chain link. Climbing the wrought iron is trickier but easier once you know. Make a prusik with two meters of an 8mm cord following this video. LINK You should have two.  Do this before you get near the fence.

Once you are at the fence wearing a harness, with prusiks in hand, this video shows how. LINK. Substitute a wrought iron bar for the vertical (green) rope. It works. You can climb any pole or bar with two strands of rope. Learn this before you are climbing a border fence. 

Put a chunk of carpet to cover any sharp junk on the top of the fence and climb on over. This is good to know if traveling north into the US or the event that we Americans need to run south.  Crossing the border is a misdemeanor but treason is a felony. Once you are in the US beware that our president is a treasonous Russian puppet. Tenga cuidado. Peace to all on both sides of that damn fence.

Lastly, you can write on your resumé that you climbed the fence using these tools to help get a job at a climbing gym.