Level Up Your Trad Climbing with Flip-Stops

Here’s an all-too-common experience in trad climbing. You’re in a precarious position and you need to place a cam quickly. You take the cam off your harness, plug it into the wall, and go to clip. Halfway through clipping, you realize the carabiner is rotated upside-down. With fatigue and fear building, you drop the rope and desperately try to spin the carabiner back to its proper clipping position. It’s safe to say many trad sends have been spoiled or made much more stressful by such a scenario.

I have one experience like this burned into my memory from my early trad climbing days. I was on my best-ever redpoint attempt on my project and I was about to clip a small cam after the crux. I realized the carabiner was oriented the wrong way so I went to flip it. In my fumbled flick of the carabiner, the wire-gate got lodged onto the sling, causing the carabiner to nearly fall off. I had to spend several seconds getting it unstuck with my free hand, all while my other arm got seriously pumped. I finally made the clip and unsurprisingly fell shortly afterwards.

If you’ve trad climbed much, you likely have a similar story. Sport climbers don’t deal with this problem because quickdraws come with rope-side carabiner stabilizers to make clipping easy and efficient – for example, the Petzl String sling protector. Cams and cam carabiners have traditionally not come with stabilizers.

Over the years, trad climbers have come up with some DIY solutions – tape, elastic bands, or even using sport climbing carabiner stabilizers. The problem with all of these is that they wear down and break over time. If you extend the cam with a quickdraw or alpine draw and then fall, the tape, elastic band, or sport climbing carabiner stabilizer (designed for a straight sling rather than a looped sling) will snap. These methods will also break remarkably easily if you go in direct to the sling when resting, dogging, or aiding.

Flip-Stop Cam Carabiner Stabilizers

Avant Climbing Innovations recently introduced a durable, long-lasting solution to this cam-clipping problem: the “Flip-Stop” Cam Carabiner Stabilizer. Made of engineering-grade TPU, an ultra-durable yet flexible plastic, the Flip-Stop snuggly holds a cam carabiner in the optimal clipping position on the cam sling. What makes this stabilization so special is that unlike other DIY methods, the Flip-Stop still allows the sling to be clipped and weighted with quickdraws without breaking.

Flip-Stops are currently sold in packs of 10 or 25, and they come with easy-to-follow install instructions. Installation is a little more labour-intensive than you’d expect. The TPU material, while flexible, isn’t very stretchy, which means the Flip-Stops don’t just slide easily over a carabiner. Avant recommends soaking the Flip-Stops in warm water and lubricating the carabiner with water and a bit of soap. I tried installation without any water and soaking, and it wasn’t too difficult on small carabiners and narrow-slinged cams. For larger carabiners, soaking and soap and water made the process much faster and easier.

Flip-Stops fit over all modern slings, but they work particularly well with narrow slings found on popular cams like Black Diamond Z4s or Totems. For older, wider slings on small, ultra-lightweight carabiners, the Flip-Stops squeeze the sling, causing it to bunch up a little.

I racked my cams with Flip-Stops and spent a few weeks trad climbing with them in Squamish. They held my carabiners in place, which made clipping much easier on tenuous finger cracks and big overhangs where floppy carabiners are a real nuisance. The Flip-Stops also allowed me to extend my pieces with quickdraws and go in direct when necessary, all without experiencing any visible signs of wear or tear. Tape or elastic bands would have snapped in no time. The Flip-Stops are super burly. I expect them to last the lifetime of the sling or even the lifetime of the cam.

To learn more about this innovative product, I reached out to Brent Barghahn, owner of Avant. We discussed how he came up with the design, the pros and cons of durability vs. flexibility in the material, safety, sling wear and tear, and more. You can read our interview below.

Originally from a small town in Minnesota, Barghahn was drawn to mechanical engineering through his early experiences building custom sports equipment. In university his focus shifted to rock climbing. After graduating, he moved to Salt Lake City to work in gear design at Black Diamond. Now living in Flagstaff, Arizona, Barghahn’s climbing focuses on technical routes, big walls, and crack lines, with lots of rope-soloing. He’s free climbed four routes on El Cap, lead rope-soloed up to 5.14, and projected many upper grade single- and multi-pitch trad routes.

Avant hosts a growing number of unique trad, multipitch, top-rope solo, and lead-rope solo products. If you’re looking for other ways to level up your trad game, check out their “Quick-Fire” Cam Release and  “Snack Pack” Multipitch Storage Pouch.

Interview with Brent Barghahn

How did you come up with the idea for the design of the Flip-Stops?

The idea for Flip-Stops came to me during sessions working Cobra Crack in Squamish last summer. This route demands powerful cam placements. While hanging off a fingertip jam, a flipped carabiner can cost valuable time and energy, potentially ruining an entire attempt.

I tried using rubber O-rings on some cams and sport draw carabiners on others, but I kept running into the same problem. Loading the cam sling will break all rubber keeper options that were previously available, and I grew frustrated with the gear. While working such a difficult route, I would often “go-in-straight”, weighting the sling with all of my body weight using a PAS or dogging draw.

It was the classic inventor’s realization of “there’s gotta be a better way!”. On a rest day, I mocked up a tape crisscross pattern that held the carabiner in place within the sling loop, but kept the loop open and usable. This tape left the webbing sticky over time, and still wore out – a final solution remained. Once back home I quickly designed a durable TPU version that could easily be added to existing cams by using a clever triple-loop and double-fold design.

The Flip-Stops are stiffer and more robust than I expected. This engineering-grade TPU construction makes it a little tough to take them on and off, but I imagine it offers amazing durability. How did you weigh the trade-offs of durability vs. ease of assembly (i.e. putting them on) when designing the Flip-Stops?

As a semi-permanent cam upgrade, I certainly erred on the side of durability over ease of install. The engineering-grade TPU is remarkably tear resistant (think Voile ski strap). I had this material in mind from the beginning, and was able to shape just the right geometry to fit a wide variety of gear without too much of a fight. And, there is a simple trick to ease install – you can warm the rubber in hot water, and lubricate the carabiner with soapy water – making the burly material the obvious choice.

Quickdraws come with rope-side carabiner stabilizers. Why are cams (or carabiners marketed as suitable cam carabiners) not traditionally sold with stabilizers? Building on this question, I think there is this urban legend that cam carabiners are “unsafe” if they are fixed to the sling. Is there any evidence that carabiner stabilizers influence the safety of cam placements?

It seems that the cam manufacturers haven’t sold cams with stabilizers because there had not been a great solution to still allow full sling function. It also may be a case of not knowing how good things could be – I worked at Black Diamond for 5 years, was involved with the most recent C4 and Z4 cam designs, and carabiner stabilizers were never discussed. It is a small refinement, but climbing gear design is quite mature, so the small refinements are the ones that now make a large difference in usage.

After tons of trad climbing with various stabilizer options over the last few years, I have not seen any evidence of negative impacts to cam safety. The two concerns brought up are extra cam walking, and the risk of back-clipping/un-clipping from the rope.

For cam walking, the sling can only transfer force to the cam and induce walking if the rope pulls the sling into tension. A loose soft-good simply can transfer load! In this tensioned sling case, the carabiner is transferring force through the sling regardless of a stabilizer being present.

Related to the un-clipping risk, I’ve personally had the racking carabiners un-clip from the cam sling, but never from the rope. The stabilizers actually remove the sling un-clipping risk. The back-clipping risk left is then the same as all sport draws on the market, and this is an acceptable risk level – there are countless times in sport climbing where only one draw is keeping us off the ground!

I find that when the Flip-Stops are on, the sling can look a little bunched up where they are being wrapped by the Flip-Stops. This is particularly true when using wider slings and smaller carabiners. I haven’t experienced this, but do the Flip-Stops accelerate wear on the sling due to how they are compressing/pinching the sling?

While Flip-Stops may create more consistent wear points on slings, extensive field testing has shown minimal impact. They do not directly wear down the sling through compression.

Where are the Flip-Stops made?

Flip-Stops are produced in a partner factory in Asia, as I lack the necessary equipment for injection molding rubber in my garage for this small brand.

Your company offers such a unique array of products. Can you tell me about how and why you started Avant Climbing Innovations?

When I quit my climbing gear Design Engineer job in 2020 to climb full time, I thought I would be done inventing new gear. But I kept tinkering in the time since, and came up with a collection of interesting accessory gear that I was using for my own climbing objectives. I specifically had created various lead rope solo accessories to be able to solo redpoint climbs near my limit.

The aspirations to create a brand truly began when the Flip-Stop prototypes came to life. This little innovation improved my own trad climbing experience enough that I wanted to bring it to the climbing world. And, since I was doing the brand start up work either way, it made sense to bring all the rope solo accessories to market, too!