Belay On

I've been rock climbing several times (okay, that is an overstatement, I've only been 3 or 4 times...), but i've never learned how to belay. I went on saturday for a date and I had told him that I'd been climbing before, so he just assumed that I had also learned to belay.

note: for those of you not familiar with climbing, the term belay is what the person on the ground does so that the person climbing won't fall. (so it's the person on the groung in this pic, and this is definitely NOT us... that is hard core difficult stuff.)

Well, my date did the lead climbing (this is where you climb up and hook the rope into the chains at the top of the climb, hooking it into bolts as you go.) Since he thought I knew how to belay, he didn't invite anyone else to come along. When I told him that I didn't know how to belay (or that I'd never done it before), he kinda freaked out and said, 'uh... well now I'm a little nervous.'

But he taught me how to belay and neither of us died. Since I had been before, I knew the basics of belaying, and it wasn't too hard, in fact, he said that I was an excellent belayer! (I don't know if he was just trying to flatter me...lol). I was so excited that I got to learn how to do it, but my neck got a bit of a kink in it from looking up. I wish I had taken some pictures! It was a blast.

I love climbing. Except it was freezing on saturday. So when it was my turn to climb, I had a really hard time because my hands got so numb that I couldn't really feel the holds. But it was still great. I wish I went more often. I only did a difficulty of 5.8. They start at 5.5 and go up to 5.9, then they go up from 5.10 a, b, c, d to 5.15 a, b, c, d. So what I did was not very difficult, but fine for a beginner :)

Oh, haha, I almost forgot. Once he had the rope hooked into the chains, he had to repel down the cliff, and i'm lighter than he is, so sometimes I'd get picked up slighty off the groung. Kinda scary, but I'm very glad I got to learn how to do it!