The equivocation hitch, also known as the daisy of death, has been getting more mainstream use as of late in the guiding world. I went ahead and put together a tech tip for Fox Mountain Guides, and a few of us went out and “red-neck” tested it.
The EQ hitch is useful in a few different situations; the main one being when the ends of the rope are not available. I find this happens when short-roping clients as well as cleaning a single pitch climb with a Gri-Gri counterbalance. The latter is usually less applicable since time is not much of an issue when working in single pitch terrain. It is also a great LNT descending method when using trees as it keeps the rope from burning the bark.
During the testing Ron Funderburke and I had a few major concerns. We wanted to see what happened if the hitch inverted. We wanted to know if twists in the rope could cause enough force on the release strand to release the system. We wanted to know if the top angle was wide (larger anchor object or bolts farther apart), would the hitch hold as well.
In all the testing we came up with two ways for the hitch to fail. One – clip into the wrong strand; two – have too small of a “loop” on the end daisy, and by this we mean very small.