Petzl
Fifty years of French vertical-safety engineering, and the spine of most rope access kits — including ours.
CMC
Rooted in rescue since 1978 — the systems professional teams build their capability around.
CMC doesn't make gear that happens to work for rescue. It makes rescue equipment, full stop — and that focus shows in everything from the MPD to the Arizona Vortex. Where other brands sell you components, CMC sells you a system that already knows how it fits together. Forty-plus years out of Santa Barbara, and still the name rescue teams say first.
- 1978Founded in Santa Barbara by Jim Frank
- 40 yrsIndependent and still focused when the anniversary came round in 2018
What we'd reach for
- MPD (Multi-Purpose Device)Pulley, belay and descent control in one unit. It collapses an entire rigging kit into a single device and loses almost nothing to friction doing it. If CMC made one thing that changed rope rescue, this is it.
- CLUTCH by HarkenDescent control engineered with Harken's sailing-hardware pedigree. Smooth under load in a way that has to be felt.
- CAPTORope grab and progress capture that just works, on the rope, one-handed.
- ATOM Access / ATOM Rescue harnessesBuilt for people who wear a harness all shift, not for an afternoon. The difference shows around hour six.
- AZTEK ProSeriesA pocket-sized mechanical advantage kit with an absurd range of uses. Every rescue tech who owns one finds a new job for it.
- Arizona VortexThe multipod high-directional that made complex artificial high points practical in the field. Tripod, bipod, monopod, sideways — it adapts.
- LEVR Escape SystemFirefighter bailout, engineered for the worst moment of someone's career.
- G11 and Static-Pro ropeLife-safety static line built to the standard rescue teams specify.
CMC has never had to pivot into rescue. It started there.
The company was founded in 1978 by Jim Frank in Santa Barbara, California, and it has spent every year since building equipment for people who go in when something has already gone wrong. It marked its fortieth anniversary in 2018. That continuity matters more than it sounds: a brand that has been solving the same problem for four decades accumulates knowledge that newer entrants simply cannot buy.
Systems, not parts
The clearest way to understand CMC is to look at the MPD.
Most rope rescue rigging asks you to assemble a solution — a pulley here, a progress-capture prusik there, a separate descent device, and the friction losses that come with stacking them. The MPD collapses that into one unit that does all of it, with less loss in the system and fewer things to get wrong under pressure.
That philosophy runs through the whole catalog. The AZTEK ProSeries packs a mechanical advantage system into something that fits in a leg pocket. The Arizona Vortex turns “we need a high directional here” from a half-day engineering problem into a field-solvable one. The CLUTCH, built with Harken — the sailing hardware people — brings marine-grade load handling to a descent control device.
You are not buying components and hoping they cooperate. You are buying something that was designed as an answer.
Built for the whole job
Technical rope rescue. Haul systems, litters, patient packaging, the hardware that makes a mainline-and-belay work the way the manual says.
Confined space. Tripods, retrieval systems and the harnesses that make extraction survivable for the person being extracted.
Rope access. ATOM Access harnesses, rope grabs, descenders and the packs to carry it — kit built for technicians who are on rope every working day.
Fire rescue. The LEVR escape system and Fulcrum belt exist for the moment a firefighter has to leave a building the hard way.
Search and rescue. Backcountry-capable rope systems, packs and patient transport for teams working a long way from a road.
They teach, too
CMC has run a rescue school for decades and publishes field guides that turn up in the hands of instructors who don’t even use CMC hardware. That’s a meaningful signal about a company: it invests in raising the standard of the whole discipline, not just in selling into it.
For anyone building a system around it, that matters twice over — the gear arrives with real documentation, and the answer to a hard rigging question usually already exists in writing.
Why CMC sits at the center of our rescue coverage
Petzl and CMC are not competitors so much as complements. Petzl owns the personal rope access kit — the harness you wear, the descender on your hip, the light on your helmet. CMC owns the system: what the team rigs, what hauls the litter, what makes the high directional stand up.
Most professional teams we’d trust run both. So do we.
We went deeper on the MPD in the journal: the CMC MPD, and the argument it started — what’s actually in the housing, the 11 mm / 13 mm rating split that’s easy to miss, and the case against the rigging philosophy it enabled.
When we reach for technical rescue, we reach for CMC.
More in Work at height
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
Skylotec
Neuwied, Germany, since 1947 — the industrial scale player, and the only brand here that also builds the building's safety system.
CAMP Safety
From a blacksmith's forge in Premana, 1889 — the brand that made professional PPE light enough to forget you're wearing it.
Edelrid
Founded 1863 in the Allgäu — the company that invented the rope everyone else's gear runs on.