Natalyn and I went to the rock climbing gym for our date last night. This was her third time there, and she finally made it to the top, and not only once, she made it up three times!

I also was finally able to make it all the way up the “hard” wall without falling. So a first for both of us.

Thanks for the fun date, Natalyn.

My friends Telly and Heidi did a lot of climbing before they had kids, and now that I have gear and am excited to go, I’ve pushed, prodded, and begged them to take me climbing and show me the ropes, literally. Today was our second climb at the Chuckwalla trailhead, and they taught me how to lead climb.

In the past, I’ve top roped, which is climbing with a rope that runs through an anchor on the top of the climb. Lead climbing is where you attach to anchors in the rock as you ascend. If you fall while top roping you don’t really fall at all, the rope stretches a little to absorb the impact, and that’s all you move. When you lead climb you fall twice the distance of your last anchor, so if I last attached to an anchor 10 feet below me, I’ll fall 20 feet, plus whatever stretch the rope needs to compensate for the shock. The advantage of lead climbing is you don’t need an alternate route to get to the anchor on top, you just climb up to it instead of climbing around the cliff looking for a hiking route to the top.

I did it and was able to set the rope so everyone else could climb, I didn’t even fall, though I was pretty close to it at one point. I’m slowly building up my endurance, and get a little better each time. Thanks, Telly and Heidi!

picture credits

Seven or eight times over the last few weeks I’ve gone to a nearby park with some friends from work during lunch break. The park has two large climbing boulders, like this one:
Each boulder has four sides, with one easy face so kids can climb. As you can tell from the picture,  the other walls are actually inverted.  The first time we went I looked at the inverted walls and though, “What a joke, I can’t climb these, nobody can climb these.”  I tried anyways, I was right I couldn’t climb any of them, at least nobody else could either

We didn’t quit though, back in the office we did pull-ups and griping exercises, trying to strengthen our climbing muscles, and we kept going back, several times a week. Eventually we all started to notice an improvement. Our goal was to be able to climb up all eight sides in one climbing session, at the beginning that seemed an impossibility, but two days ago Pete did it!  He’s nearly a foot taller than the rest of us, so we joked that it was his height that gave him an advantage, but in reality he’s been hitting the pull-up bar more than the rest of us and has bulked up. I didn’t feel too bad though, I did six of the eight sides the same day, a far cry from only being able to do the two easy sides.

Finally, one hour ago, I was able to climb all 8 sides consecutively! Even better, when I finished, I climbed one of the hard sides again, just because I could.

SUCCESS!!!

We’ve already been certified to belay at the local climbing wall, so our next goal is to climb all 16 corners, and then we’ll start some top-rope climbing at some of the local rock formations.