Neon Speedrack Gear Sling - The Organizer You Never Knew You Needed

The Speedrack from Neon Climbing is a handle style gear sling made to help organize your gear in those in-between moments from the house to the bag to the car to the crag. Think of it as the thing between the slings, when you’re racking from bins or pegboard and want to keep certain gear from mixing on a shoulder sling, but you don’t want it to turn into a pile in your bag or a complicated chain of gear you’ll have to take apart later.

Pueblo Colorado, USA

Anyone who has a need to organize their gear either before or during a climbing trip. If you climb more than one style between storing your gear (whether that’s in a roof box, a pegboard or a pile in your mom’s basement) then having a staging area for your gear helps a ton. Pulling gear from longer-term storage and having a place that isn’t your final rack can massively speed up racking time. When paring down a full rack in the parking lot, you can move pieces you don’t need onto a Speedrack without resulting in a pile you’ll have to re-sort later. If you’ve ever been frustrated even once with clipping things into or out of retired slings or webbing with knots, a handle gear sling like the Speedrack should be on your wishlist.

The single gear loop is reinforced with vinyl tubing which adds rigidity and wear resistance to the part of the sling that sees the most action. If you have hooked nose carabiners and hate it when they snag on slings, this isn’t a problem with a Speedrack. It has a handle, which is a piece of tubular webbing with vinyl tubing inside it which creates a stiff, chunky grab spot that is easier to find than a sling when reaching into a bag. This handle also creates a clipping point for hanging the Speedrack from trees or handles in your car, making racking between climbs or at the parking lot a lot less messy. I also find that I can use the handle as a mini second gear loop to keep items like belay gloves, a prussik or a belay device on the rack, but out of the way.

I’ve used it in 2 distinctly different ways: As a mini rack, and as a staging area while shifting from one location/objective to the next.

Sport climbing in my local crag doesn’t require a ton of gear. Lower-offs have become the ethic and there is rarely a need for anything fancy beyond maybe a PAS for cleaning, a belay device and some draws. Rather than dig through my kitchen sink of a rack that I take with me everywhere, I can rack my sport gear all on a Speedrack and clip it onto my trad rack. This way I can just toss it in my bag if I’m going sport climbing and know that everything I’ll need is on there, including a pre-tied quad anchor, a pair of belay gloves and maybe a prussik/atc in case of emergencies or if a rap is necessary.

When/if I need some draws for a trad climb, it is easy to grab the Speedrack from the bottom of a bag or unclip it from the trad rack, grab what I need and leave the rest intact. I’ve completely stopped using slings for racking like this and it’s nice not having to think/remember if ‘that sling I have gear on’ is safe to use as a backup or if it’s just bootied tat. This of course could also be done to build a mini rack of trad gear, or even to split a trad rack in half: A single rack + Speedrack = double rack is some pretty cool math if you think about it.

I live several hours’ drive from real rock, which means my time being able to plug gear is limited, and when I take trips they are often for several days. This has resulted in getting used to carrying way too much gear with me, which leads to pushing my racking time from home to the parking lot. It is not uncommon that I will have my entire double rack slung over my shoulder while I pick through and pull the rack for the day’s objective, and having a Speedrack to rack to instead of a pile on the floor has me rethinking the way I prep for climbs.

Rather than throwing a second sling on my other shoulder or tossing a pile of ‘don’t need it’ on the floorboard, I can clip a Speedrack to the grab handle above the back seat of my car. With the Speedrack now hanging above me, I can either dump stuff I don’t need off my gear sling onto it (if I plan to climb with the gear sling) or clip only what I need for the day onto a Speedrack and toss it in the bag. The rest of my rack can be left intact and sorted for whatever tomorrow’s objective is, and today’s gear is now easier to find in my bag than blindly grabbing at a knotted sling and pulling out a rat’s nest.

Similarly when racking at home, I can hang a Speedrack (or two) off my home wall or a doorknob and rack odd pieces directly onto to them, rather than cluttering up my main gear sling. This is something I am used to doing with my wide gear (aka the boat anchors), my tiny stuff (C3s, Zeros, and Micronuts) and aid gear (haul kit, ascenders, aiders.) Being able to compartmentalize my rack like this means leaving certain chunks out easily, and I find this work goes much faster and less fiddly with the Speedrack than the old retired slings I used to use.

Is the Speedrack worth it?

If you’re like me and you have a lot of gear, it is absolutely helpful to have more than one solution for racking up. No matter if that is at home before a trip or on the pavement behind a car in Yosemite, I find the Speedrack to be far superior to a shoulder sling in many ways. It’s compact and lightweight yet still holds a ton of gear, and it just makes a lot more sense than using a second shoulder gear sling or a floppy, knotted piece of webbing.

Since Neon sent me these Speedracks for this review I would say I have upgraded my organization game quite a bit. I no longer have to clip all my wide gear in a chain that will inevitably frustrate me when its time to take one piece off. I now know that every sling in the bottom of my 55L bag is for climbing and not some tangle of knots that keeps my micronuts and minicams separated from my rack. I no longer have a pile in the floorboard when I’m returning from a day of climbing, and I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night with some piece of climbing gear in my back because I whipped it into the car as we were leaving to climb that morning. Everything is where I can find it; on a Speedrack, ready to go.