“Just jump for it!”
The next handhold was four feet to my left. It was a tiny crevasse filled with moss and slippery from the recent rain. I was twenty feet from the summit and fifty feet from the very hard rocks on the ground beneath me.
“Don’t be a pussy!”
My friend Sean shouted encouragement from the ground. The man is made of muscle, so his advice made sense to him. Just hurl yourself up a cliff face and use upper body strength to negate any need for finesse or grace.
finesse: (n.) a term used by weak people to feel better about not being able to do something through brute force.
Rock Climbing
At its purest, rock climbing isn’t a sport. In recent years, it has turned into a multi-million dollar industry, complete with climbing idols, overly-priced safety equipment, and the complete destruction of its soul.
I am not opposed to commercializing an activity. I can purchase rock climbing equipment easier than at any time in history. I can scope out new crags online, complete with pictures, directions, and climber reviews. I can practice keeping a strong center of balance with Cyber Climber.
But today’s climbers are missing out on the core of rock climbing. It isn’t about impressing other climbers or climbing a higher difficulty grade than before. The heart of rock climbing is discovery.
Scanning through online reviews of local cliffs, the vast majority of negative reviews complain about too much dirt and overgrowth. “It’s too undeveloped!” the reviewers lament.
This is the problem with modern sports. We demand a prepackaged experience when we should be making our own adventures. I can barely find a free route in my local climbing gym because of all the people, but my local cliffs stand unused. I live in the foothills of the Appalachians – there are plenty of solid crags within half an hour of my house, but my friends and I are the only ones who seem to climb on them.
When I first got into rock climbing, I followed the advice of experienced climbers, obeyed every minor safety procedure, and rented every unnecessary piece of equipment. I went to the climbing gym and got bored. I went to a well-known cliff in West Virginia and felt absolutely no adrenaline, even though I was hanging from a slab of rock fifty feet high. The most exciting part of the trip was seeing a mountain lion during the hike to the cliff.
I gave up on rock climbing. “It just isn’t for me,” I told all my friends. Nobody understood why—I’m the consummate adrenaline junky. I’m obsessed with heights and I love the outdoors, so it didn’t make any sense that rock climbing was so boring for me.
Six months later, I was hiking through the woods with my Sean and we ran into a decent-sized cliff. It was forty feet tall and covered in moss. You could barely see the rock through the wallpaper of green, but we decided to climb up it.
I almost fell off at thirty feet. I was shimmying along the edge and twisted around to look down at the waterfall (we had been following a river through the woods). The dirt and moss under my right hand came uprooted and I flailed wildly for another handhold. I didn’t find one.
I did find a tree, though. Thank God for an oak tree that grew right next to the cliff. I grabbed onto a branch and clung to it like a toddler holding onto his mother’s leg. Sean was a few feet above me and heard my scream. In traditional guy fashion, he checked that I was alive and kept climbing. I leaned back to the cliff and tried to catch up to him.
We reached the top a few minutes later and sat on the roots of a tree, dangling our feet off the cliff and looking at the valley beneath us. We were filthy, drenched in sweat, and exhilarated. The sun shined through the green canopy and bathed the river with its warmth—squirrels bounced from tree to tree and a young couple cuddled on a rock upriver.
That day, I discovered rock climbing.
“What do I need to rock climb?”
Here is a secret that climbing gear companies don’t want you to know about: you don’t actually need any equipment to rock climb. I wouldn’t recommend climbing el Capitan in Yosemite, but almost anything under twenty or thirty feet is climbable in tennis shoes and jeans. In fact, there is a whole genre of rock climbing that uses no safety equipment whatsoever (except maybe a small mattress). Bouldering focuses on the difficult of small, low-to-the-ground “problems.” Whether it’s a difficult roof, a dyno grab, or an impossible stretch, bouldering problems require intense focus, maximum effort, and minimum equipment.
If you plan to climb larger cliffs, you should pick up the basic equipment. Note that “basic equipment” does not mean “every single piece of climbing gear that I may, in some unlikely scenario, need to have.” For standard rock climbing, you need:
1. One 150-foot rope.
I’m indifferent to minor danger, but falling onto rock from seventy feet up is not a healthy habit to get into. If you’re going to climb higher than twenty or thirty feet, buy a good climbing rope. They come in different lengths, but 150-200 feet will usually be plenty for top roping.
If you’re climbing in dry conditions (summertime climbing only, etc.), save some money and buy a dry rope. They don’t handle ice and rain very well, but they’re dramatically cheaper than non-dry ropes.
2. One harness
Harnesses come in two categories: simple and stupid. I love REI, so let’s check out their harnesses as an example. Here are two of their harnesses, the cheapest and the most expensive.
Both of these harnesses are marketed for mountaineers and alpine climbers. The Arc’Teryx costs $100 more – it has a few more buckles and weighs slightly less, but here’s another secret for you: both harnesses work! You might be a little more comfortable in the Arc’Teryx, but who goes rock climbing to be comfortable? If you’re climbing right, you should be too focused on climbing to care how soft leg loops are.
3. Two carabiners
Get two of them. Get the locking kind. That’s all you actually need to know.
4. One strip of webbing
Webbing is cheap, simple, and will safe your life if you fall. In top-roping, webbing is used to set the anchor (which we will discuss in a moment). You don’t need a lot of it – REI offers a 30-foot package for $12. You can also buy webbing by the foot, which is a bit cheaper. If you’re starting out, though, this is a convenient little package.
“But what about a helmet?”
Since we were born, we’ve been trained to expect the worst. In the lawyer-run, self-protective spineless orgy of fear that is American society, we’ve forgotten that life is pointless without danger. Nobody gets rich without risk, nobody gets famous by playing it safe, and nobody experiences the full scope of life without danger.
And not the Americanized danger of triple-backup safety harnesses, helmets, and professional supervision.
Helmets aren’t required to rock climb. If you’re lead climbing or climbing on a cliff with loose rock, it’s probably a good idea, but it isn’t necessary.
Helmets
Don’t get me wrong. I like my head and prefer that it stays relatively undamaged. If you find a cheap helmet or if you know someone who has one, feel free to use it. I use one if I’m climbing a relatively public cliff or one with a hiking trail on top (little kids love to throw rocks over the edge), but I seldom use one for day-to-day climbing.
Climbing Shoes
Climbing your local crag in $150 climbing shoes is like biking to the store on a $4000 racing bicycle. It makes you look like a tool. Climbing shoes are necessary for difficult climbs and advanced cliffs, but your local crags can most likely be climbed in tennis shoes. I have several friends who climb intense routes in hiking boots.
Chalk
Chalk falls into the same category as shoes. It’s important for advanced work, but its pointless for most local cliffs. If your hands are seriously starting to sweat, wipe them on their shirt. If you can’t make it up forty feet of a medium-difficulty cliff without chalk, build muscles instead of buying chalk. It’s cheaper and more effective.
Finding a cliff and setting the anchor
Use Rockclimbing.com to find a cliff near you, find a couple friends who want to climb, and go!
If you don’t like the cliff, don’t feel any pressure to climb it. Print out a list of several cliffs and scope out each one to figure out your favorite. Next, go to the top of the cliff and set up your anchor.
Top-roping is the simplest form of climbing (besides bouldering). Using an anchor on top of the cliff, one person climbs while another person belays. To make a solid anchor, you have to remember four things (SARENE):
1. Solid Anchors
Make sure that your anchor isn’t going to rip out of the ground and send you plummeting to expensive hospital bills. Solid, well-rooted trees and sturdy bolts are the best anchors. Popular cliffs frequently have a metal anchor installed for you.
2. Redundancy
Equipment fails. Use at least two pieces of webbing or two base anchors. If one breaks, the other will make sure you don’t die.
3. Equalization
Every piece of equipment should receive the same amount of force. Make sure everything is equalized and your equipment will be much safer and longer lasting. This step also sets us up for the fourth requirement:
4. No Extension
If you have equalized redundancy, you’re set for the unlikely event of equipment failure. This last step keeps you from falling even a few feet if a piece of webbing breaks. A poorly constructed anchor will shift and drop you 3-7 feet if something breaks. If you’ve properly equalized your anchors, there should be no extension whatsoever. Extension can force your head into the rock, but it also greatly increases the stress placed on the remaining equipment, which can cause further equipment failure.
What about belaying?
Belaying is a vital aspect of top-roping. It is also been overcomplicated by climbing gyms and equipment fanatics. In an ideal scenario, the belayer will have their own harness, a belaying device, and a pair of heavy duty gloves. In a pinch, you don’t need any of these things. Take the other end of the rope and wrap it around a tree. Keep the rope taut as the climber progresses up the cliff, and use the friction from the tree to prevent him from falling if he loses his grip.
This sounds too simple to be effective and you’ll probably be yelled out by “experienced rock climbers,” but it works and hasn’t caused me any problems yet!
YBW’s Rules for Rock Climbing
1. Climb for fun, excitement, and exercise. Don’t climb for your ego.
2. Use common sense and don’t worry if you don’t have the most expensive equipment available.
3. Connect with the local climbing scene to find new crags and meet some awesome new people.
4. Don’t worry about the difficulty rating of your cliffs. As long as you’re challenging yourself and having a good time, you don’t need anything else.
5. Just climb.
