Hiya! It's a good question. It depends on the type of carabiner. With ordinary wire gate carabiners, all that needs to happen to open the gate is for pressure to be applied, so if you are using two of them to make some sort of attachment, you absolutely want them clipped in opposition to each other.
A common type of carabiner, used where things don't need to be clipped or unclipped under pressure is a screw gate or locking type. Those are mostly what we use in canyoneering (In a canyon I carry about 8-9 screw gates and 2 wire gates) and you screw the gate closed, so that pressure won't open it.
The type of carabiners you see in the picture are special via ferrata carabiners, which differ in two important respects from climbing carabiners. Firstly they are much stronger, to deal with potentially higher forces generated in a VF fall. Secondly, those particular ones need to be squeezed from both sides in order to open - they are effectively locking types which can be opened almost as fast as a wire gate. If the 'biner isn't squeezed from both sides simultaneously, it won't open.
It is possible you were using slightly different tyoes at Go Ape, which didn't have this particular feature, and so clipping in opposition would be more important.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-08-18 11:41 am (UTC)A common type of carabiner, used where things don't need to be clipped or unclipped under pressure is a screw gate or locking type. Those are mostly what we use in canyoneering (In a canyon I carry about 8-9 screw gates and 2 wire gates) and you screw the gate closed, so that pressure won't open it.
The type of carabiners you see in the picture are special via ferrata carabiners, which differ in two important respects from climbing carabiners. Firstly they are much stronger, to deal with potentially higher forces generated in a VF fall. Secondly, those particular ones need to be squeezed from both sides in order to open - they are effectively locking types which can be opened almost as fast as a wire gate. If the 'biner isn't squeezed from both sides simultaneously, it won't open.
It is possible you were using slightly different tyoes at Go Ape, which didn't have this particular feature, and so clipping in opposition would be more important.