A chest harness is important to hold your belay device in the correct orientation while climbing. If you don't do this, the device will not auto-feed well. This can be a safety concern if your device locks up mid crux, causing you to fall. We prefer to use the Avant Climbing LRS Chest Harness due to its lightweight minimalist design.

Brent uses a cam assisted belay device to self belay. There are many devices that match this description. Each device will provide a different balance between auto-feeding and grabbiness. We prefer to use the grabbiest possible device that we can still coax into auto-feeding because they will engage most reliably in a fall while allowing us to climb relatively unencumbered. The Petzl GriGri+, in top rope mode, is our preferred device. When hung upside down from your chest harness it feeds surprisingly well, but engages almost instantly in a fall. Plus it comes in purple!

Each grabby device needs a carabiner and we recommend an anti-cross loading carabiner since both of your hands will be occupied with climbing. There are a lot of these style carabiners, but grabby devices have two parallel plates and therefore don't sit well on a D shape carabiners. We recommend pear shaped (HMS) or hourglass shaped carabiners.

One of the biggest dangers in lead rope soloing is back feeding. This is when the weight of your rope causes slack to accumulate at the bottom of your climb. If you take a fall with a bunch of unnoticed slack in your system, your fall length will be significantly higher than expected. The Avant Climbing Soft-Cinch is a rubber widget that attaches to your quickdraw and pinches the rope just enough to stop rope from back feeding, while not impacting the strength of your rope in a fall.