Taking the Plunge: The elements of rock

AMC Outdoors, June 2001

By Katharine Wroth

I back toward the edge of the cliff, my fingers curled around two thicknesses of a stout, purple nylon rope. Its midpoint has been securely rigged a few feet in front of me; its ends brush the ground, 80 feet below. With each step I take, the rope slithers slowly through a metal rappel device clipped to the harness I wear. My task: to gracefully hurl myself over the cliff and slide back to earth, controlling the rope with my hands and using my feet to "walk" down the rocks.

My arches poised on the edge, I peek at the ground below, impossibly far away, then whip my head up in shock. "Don't look down!" laughs one of my fellow students, a phys ed teacher who's already had her turn. I focus on my feet, let out a little more rope, lean back, and — bam! I swing to the left and bash, full body, into the sheer gray rock.

As the shock reverberates to my coccyx, I look up at my instructor and into the curious eyes of my fellow students. Any embarrassment I feel is well overshadowed by the fact that I am dangling, fairly helpless, from a purple rope. This was not part of the plan.

Ready for Adventure
Before I found myself attempting it, rock climbing always struck me as a sport for extremists. The few people I knew who did it seemed to be either a) in prime physical condition, or b) nuts — and sometimes both. On the Likelihood of Wroth Participation scale, climbing ranked somewhere between eating fire and wrestling alligators. But when this assignment came up, I found that I was suddenly curious and, always willing to serve as an AMC Outdoors guinea pig, volunteered.

Ready for adventure, I took three steps: first, I signed up for an AMC Intro to Rock Climbing workshop, to be held at the Mohican Outdoor Center in New Jersey. Then I outlined a regimen of push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and other exercises to transform myself into a bulked-up goddess who could race up the rocks. Finally, I proceeded to ignore said regimen until the night before my trip.

At Mohican, I met the other members of my class: the phys ed teacher; a woman who had just gone sky diving; and an 18-year-old male blessed with a healthy dose of presumed immortality. Though I was clearly raising the wimp factor in that group, their collective confidence was more inspiring than intimidating. We signed our lives away (sorry, Mom, it's true: the release form specifically mentioned the possibility of death) and headed out with our instructor, Lyle Lange of Mountain Sports Adventure School.

Queen of the Quarries
At a cliff in the cool woods of the Delaware Water Gap, we began to learn the intricacies of rappelling and top-roping — that is, climbing while tied in to a rope, which is attached to a sort of pulley system above you, anchored below you, and controlled by someone behind you. Setting this up is not a simple procedure. There is no doubt in my mind that, for many people, the threading of rope through metal, the knot-tying, the double-checking all combine to create a sort of meditation. To a novice, however, these things were complicated and time consuming. Give me skis or sneakers any day, I thought. Let me throw them on and go.

After we'd spent a good while learning how to set up the system, tie ourselves into it, and belay our partners, we each had a shot at the rocks. When my turn came, I walked gingerly up to the cliff in my narrow green-and-black climbing shoes, put one toe up, and stopped. "Is anyone going to tell me how to do this?" I asked. "No," came the answer. A faceful of hard, unyielding gray in front of me, I took my first step up.

Hey, this isn't so bad, I thought, scrambling up a few feet, then a few more. Maybe I've discovered my true calling, my destiny: to be a woman of the rocks, a queen of the quarries, a lithe mountain goat who — and then I was stuck.

A Game of Vertical Twister
Revising my aspirations as the seconds ticked eternally by, I began hoping only to find the next foothold. Climbing is like calling your own game of vertical Twister: left foot up, right hand over, does my body bend this way? With the help of Lange's guidance from the ground — like any good teacher, he left most of the actual decisions up to the fool on the cliff, saving specific instructions only for cases of severe panic — I managed, aided also by some mild profanity and a few soothing glances toward the vast green stretch of New Jersey now laid out at my feet, to claw my way to the top.

Repeating the process on this and other routes over the next two days, I sweated, stretched, reached, cursed. I slipped my fingers into cracks in the rock that I would have sworn offered space enough only for a ladybug. My toes, as they navigated the ledges and nubs along my route, made the leap from mere appendages to objects of utility. Fear, frustration, confusion, satisfaction, pride — all these flooded through my exhausted body.

And, yes, joy took a turn when, following Lange's careful instructions, I transformed my crash into the cliff — the simple result of keeping my feet glued to the rock for too long — back into a proper rappel. Righting myself slowly, clinging to the purple rope like there was no tomorrow, I inched my way down to the ground. From there, I had nowhere to go but up.

—Katharine Wroth is Associate Editor of AMC Outdoors.