im big into rock climbing..mainly sport climbing..where someone placed bolts into the rock face and one must clip the rope and draws in as you ascend...alot of east coast climbing is like this and aside from that, there is a certain degree of security offered by permanent bolts in the wall.

climbing allows me a kind of serenity i cant get anywhere else..its the one place where the only thing i focus on is the space around me and how i navigate it to reach my goal

this past winter i had the pleasure of seeing a slide show presented by a free solo climber, micheal reardon. free soloing involves no ropes, no security, and no gear. it has an established presence in the community and is accepted on many levels but its only a matter of time before one hears of the next free solo tragedy.

it kind of hit home this weekend when michael reardon went missing in ireland. he was free climbing a seaside cliff and was hit by a rogue wave and washed to sea. he has not been found. the link explains it all.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0716/reardonm.html

to my point

why the f would you do this with a family . i can understand the gratification and satisfaction available from such activities...but man..your wife and daughter..alone now. whats up with that?

sort of just venting. thoughts on free climbing/story

 

climbing gym = safe.

 

No danger = No fun...

Gyms are for training.
Until you experience the thrill of climbing a rock face without ropes and the security they provide you feel like you haven't lived. I remember my first time when I was a kid climbing a cliff of a couple hundred feet with no gear, we didn't think anything of it we were all just a bunch of kids and these cliffs were behind the military housing. It was just a place to play, granted there were no places that you had to swing out and hold yourself in the air, but it was straight down and a long way to fall. We learned where every crack and crevasse was in the face of that wall for finger/toe holds. I did some more rock climbing as an adult when I was stationed out west, and never used any safety gear climbing on the walls of canyons. Some of us just have more daredevil in us than others. I haven't done any climbing in ages, and when I went to a climbing gym it was just exercise...

 

there's plenty of room between safe and stupid.

I was in college and my friends and I all had one day a week free so we'd go climb on the bluffs along a local river on nice days. One really nice day we were out there going up and down the cliffs, smoking pot and generally being harmless when we heard a group of people talking and making noise just around the rocks. It was a PE class from our college, with ropes, helmets, shoes, the whole kit.

I had to laugh when the instructor came over and said he'd feel better if we just joined his class so we would be doing it the "safe" way lol. We were climbing where we were because the cliff was very rocky and clear of any vegetation, the face was a little less than vertical, and offered enough danger to be fun but nothing that would ensure certain death or anything. Maybe a 15-20 foot stretch from top to bottom, 20 feet wide or so, covered with ledges and things the whole way up. A very easy climb, really, but it made you feel like a hero every time. What they were doing was the Nerf version of "playing on a rocky hillside," at a spot with weeds, shrubs, small trees, basically just a steep rough slope, buggy and shaded with a bit of moisture seeping so you got wet and muddy on your way up. 10 feet away from us and the last place I wanted to climb. Safe enough though.

So we went to the bottom of the bluff, climbed across below them and around and up what I would normally consider a stupid risky face up to a cave where we sat and smoked for the rest of the afternoon.

I'm not mocking their gear, just the situation

The North Shore of Lake Superior has a ton of great places to climb, and as a kid, we'd go camping along the lake and me and my brothers would climb all morning and afternoon on rock faces over the lake. Seems like climbing was easier when I only weighed 50-70 pounds, for some reason lol. For sure I took stupid risks without knowing, but we usually had a few basic rules and tried to stay reasonably safe. We figured if you needed a rope, you probably shouldn't be climbing there, what with the wisdom of twelve whole years and all.

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I don't like climbing gyms/walls because you pretty much have to have special shoes to do anything, and while it's a good workout, not even close to the kind of "rock climbing" I consider fun. Way too technical and always a set number of paths up below the ropes, with no way to "explore" without getting pulled off the wall by your over-zealous belayer. I have more fun climbing over boulders.