I came across this little video snippet explaning how strong a rock climbing rope actually is. Funny how the cousins across the pond still insist on working in pounds! There’s a nice little bit of physics tucked in here as well, which explains what those little KN labels across all your load bearing gear mean. 1033941494 In plain English, what that means is that 1KN is the force of (i.e. the weight of) 100kg of stuff. Now I only weigh around 72 Kg in my shreddies, so my weight is well less than a1 KN. A lot of load bearing climbing gear is rated at upwards of 22 KN. For instance my nice shiny new climbing rope is a beal cobra 1/03/2011