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Is Rock Climbing the Sport for You?

Our intern, Garett, was a kid who had to climb everything. Not just trees, mind you, but the stone chimney at the family lake place, the jungle gym at school, and up the corners of brick buildings. Problem was, Garett could only climb up, not down, so he could only climb as far as he could stand to jump back down. ClimbNakedShoes.com has been a good place for Garett. He has learned how a good pair of shoes, proper technique, and a quality climbing posse can improve his ability to climb anything that looms in his path, and we have learned that interns will do anything for free stuff.

Sound like you? You might want to start off bouldering – that is, climbing without ropes, harnesses or gadgets, under a standard height of about 30 feet. Bouldering is climbing’s equivalent of sledding in a cardboard box: you don’t have to be rich, you don’t have to know what you’re doing, but it can be both tough and dangerous. You can boulder anywhere, anytime, alone or in groups, making it readily accessible for beginners, but variable enough to challenge any climber. ClimbNakedShoes.com fully encourages you to climb any surface with even so much as a dime-edge hold, but again, your local law enforcement officers may not share our enthusiasm.

Another type of climbing is the top-roping technique, commonly used in gyms, where the chorus of “on belay”, “belay on”, “climbing”, “climb on”, can overpower even the loudest of iPod ear buds. In top-roping, a rope is looped around something stationary (and preferably strong) at the top of the route, like a rock, tree, or the Governator’s bulging quads. A climber attaches himself to said rope at one end, while the colleague on belay duty attaches himself to the other end of the rope, tightening the slack as the climber progresses. And kids, please, be smart, be safe. Always have a belay card.

Clearly, though, the top of every climbing route is not easily accessible. Thus, the necessary invention of sport climbing, the weekend warrior’s perfect climbing challenge. In sport climbing, real routes are established for you already on real rocks, often on real, big mountains. You can go there, free climb to each bolt, clip your rope in, then climb to the next one and do the same. So you get to feel (and look, to all those peons on the ground) like there’s nothing to fall back on, but the truth is, when you miss that double dyno jump, you won’t fall much more than twice, to two and a half times the distance to your last clip. Get it? Cool.

If your last Halloween costume was Evil Knievel or Icarus, don’t fret. There’s another realm of climbing reserved just for you: traditional climbing, traditionally known as – guess what? – trad climbing. This is what you saw people doing when you were driving your RV through Yosemite last summer. You slept in a single-wide; they slept dangling from a couple bolts stuck in the face of Half Dome. Trad climbers find a rock, preferably a very, very large one, and then they climb it, wedging in anchors called “cams” and “friends” in strategic locations to connect themselves to the rock in case of a fall. Assuming, of course, the anchor doesn’t slip and the rock is quality enough not to crumble.

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