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Here’s a tip to help your Scouts remember how to tie a clove hitch

Did you know a clove hitch is essentially two simple knots? When your Scout is tying lashings, all they need to know to create a clove hitch is how to tie a half-hitch.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some camp hacks that the BSA’s national camping subcommittee has shared with us. This week, we’re showing you how to tie a clove hitch, which is used to begin and end many lashings. Special thanks to Larry Green for the tips and text below.


John Thurman, the Camp Chief at Gilwell Park in England for more than 25 years, wrote, “The first and everlasting thing to remember about the clove hitch is that it is composed of two half-hitches.”

  1. If you make one half-hitch…
  2. and then an identical half-hitch…
  3. and bring them together, you form a clove hitch.
  4. The identical half-hitches can be formed in any direction. This is a good thing, because many lashings need to be finished from either one direction or the other.
  5. First half-hitch (finishing a shear lashing).
  6. Second half-hitch.
  7. Both half-hitches are brought together.

When a clove hitch is formed in this manner, snugging it right against the wraps to finish a lashing is easy.

Watch the video of this technique below.

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