Pete blindfolded himself on the rope, then asked us to talk him through a changeover using only our words. Turns out “no, the other one” is not a useful instruction when someone can’t see.

Then he paired us up to try it ourselves. Nicky’s attempt went sideways almost immediately. Sam’s verdict: “The most memorable bit was Ellie trying to talk Nick through the changeover.” Nicky’s verdict: “Painfully watching poor Ellie try.” Ellie, to her credit, did try. Nick, to his, did eventually get down. In the time it took her to finish, the rest of us had all had a go.

Saturday was an SRT rescue workshop with Pete at Pindale in the Peak District. Scaffold bars, bolts, platforms, traverse lines at various heights, and my thirty-two-month-old son wandering around asking to go on a bike ride. Pete ran the session. My son ran interference.

The morning was blindfolded changeovers and rigging refreshers. The afternoon was the thing I’d actually come to learn: how to rescue someone stuck on a traverse.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t know how to do a traverse rescue before Saturday. I’ve led SRT trips. I’ve rigged pitches. But if someone had gone limp halfway across a traverse line, I’d have been improvising and hoping. Now I know the actual method, and it’s one of those things that seems obvious once someone shows you: haul them up at each bolt until their cow’s tails go slack, move the tails past the anchor, lower them down, shift the haul system to the next bolt, repeat.

The hauling mechanics took a while to sink in for everyone. A bare rope through a pulley with a descender eating half your effort gets you roughly nowhere. A Z-rig on a doubled rope gets you into 6-to-1 territory, which is where Sam (89.7kg plus kit that morning, not 98, he was keen to clarify) actually started moving upward. Pete’s coaching to the group hauling him: “Try harder than that.”

Two teams ran simultaneous traverse rescues. Ellie attempted a solo rescue of Nick using a counterbalance technique, which worked partly because Ellie is determined and her technique was solid. “Which is probably why I could do it for one,” she said, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who’d just deadlifted a human sideways up to a scaffold bar.

Pete covered pull-throughs in the afternoon. Nicky had always been puzzled by them: “It’s always really puzzled me how it can work, but the counterweight one seems really obvious now we know how to do it.” The counterbalance method is the kind of thing where you see it once and think, of course. Pete set it up on the scaffold and someone took a photo because apparently nobody demonstrates this version. Cavers descend single lines. Climbers double-rope abseil. The technique exists in the gap between the two worlds and nobody teaches it.

Critical thing from the pull-through section: never use a figure-8 as a blocking knot. We’d all watched one get pulled legs-apart and come undone earlier that day. And always check the end of the rope for knots before you pull through, even if someone says they’ve untied it. Especially if someone says they’ve untied it.

James wanted more advanced self-rescue scenarios. What happens when the rescuer needs rescuing? That’s the kind of question that makes Pete go quiet for a second before answering. Sam found the traverse training most useful. Nicky found all of it helpful. I found the bit where Nicky while discussing lowering an unconscious person, accidentally said “I can put them down really easily, I have got a shotgun” then immediately reconsidered her vocabulary.

Pete’s closing thought: “It’s useful to know what you are physically capable of, and the best way to find that out is in a safe controlled training environment, not mid-rescue.”

My son, meanwhile, had learned to say “mountain rescue ambulance” which is also a useful skill.