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Good testimonial Eric. Any vast difference between it and your basic knee ascender setup?
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I haven't tried the HAAS...yet! I would say the sheer simplicity is the best feature.
A few years ago, I played around with something similar in which the bungee originated at the knee ascender (Croll in my case) and then ran up through a DMM Revolver (located upside down in the lower eye of my bridge swivel) and down to a Pantin on my right foot. This made for a lengthy bungee cord which provided nice action without too much tension between steps. It also sort of feels like one leg helps the other as you're walking up the line. That system required the same hand over hand action as the HAAS. I stopped using it when I felt I wasn't encountering long enough ascents on a daily basis, and I rarely found good clean routes for "open" ascent.
Every now and again I get a tree that has a few stations way up high and I need an efficient way to blast up there, but for the most part, I'm working on my way up so I just go bare bones...no Pantin, no ascenders, nothing to disconnect for work positioning...just foot lock with the lanyard over the shoulder...sometimes even sitting on the hitch between locks. Other times, if I'm feeling it, I'll coil up a few rounds of my climb line tail into a monkey fist that hangs a couple feet off the ground so that when I do the "pull up" portion of the foot lock, I have enough tail weight to actually gain that progress.
For those occasions at work, or rec climbing, I would LOVE to have a HAAS on hand. So cool.
