nawl

A second outdoor rock climbing expedition, this time to the Shawangunks, apparently the East coast's premier climbing destination, conveniently located only an hour north of New York City.

I was given some old climbing manuals to read in the car. They described a different world of climbing, one where lots of attention was given to the ways to tie rope around yourself in order to belay or rappel (no harnesses), people modified normal hard-soled shoes with epoxy to climb with, and people hammered pitons (metal wedges with rings) into crevices as they climbed. In the last 30 years, rock climbing has been changed into a sport that focuses much more on what the old manuals called "rock gymnastics", and adopted (at least in the US) a leave-no-trace attitude that frowns on anything that leaves any mark whatsoever (one new manual suggested climbers bring a wire brush to remove chalk from holds as they rappelled back down). Because of new equipment, routes that were hard 50 years ago are considered beginner-level now.

The first route was called "Frog's Head", an odd name because it was on the next route over that every climber shouted "Hey, there's a frog's head here!" Here is someone else leading it:

So the climbing. All the routes this time were led, and I seconded. They were all also multi-pitch. The leader goes first, shoving metal "nuts" and "friends" into crevices and attaching the rope to these as he proceeds, and is belayed from below by the second, so as to only fall twice the distance since the last nut, instead of to the ground. Then the leader ties in at a ledge midway up, and belays the second from above. My job is to follow the route and remove all of the equipment from the rock. This is repeated at successive ledges until the top.

For a sport that safety requires be done in groups of at least two, there are an awful lot of solitary moments. Moments resting, for example, where all I hear is my breathing against the rock as I test all the handholds within reach and contemplate which combination I feel most secure trusting my weight to, and then a small cloud of white dust fluttering away past my feet as I re-chalk my hands and prepare to move. Or the times when I'm belaying, perched alone on a small ledge a hundred feet up the cliff, paying out rope as it's drawn up, listening to the traffic far away, watching hawks in the distance and the afternoon shade descend on the forest below.

Alone, that is, until shouts come from above or below with suggestions on how to move most effectively, or to climb or not climb, or belay on or off.

We rappelled down from the first route. I don't normally admit to being afraid of heights, but it took a few minutes to convince myself that I really was going to step backwards off of a 150 foot cliff with a single hand holding the rope that was going to keep me from falling to a violent death below. Because of the elasticity of the rope, you actually have to step off of the cliff before you feel it going taut.

This route is called "Sixish". It was deceptively hard for the rating, though I eventually made it up to the tree:

We abandoned for an easier route called "Beginner's Delight", which stayed true to its name. It involved a layback, which is easier than it looks, an alarmingly long period of inching across a cm-wide foothold, one major scary fall for me, and lots of nice resting on ledges.

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Yesterday a bunch of interns went to see Rent in the city. One person won the lottery for $20 front row seats, and another bought a front row seat for $30 off someone who had an extra, so I sat alone in the balcony. Afterward, we wandered around Manhattan, ate Ethiopian food, and sat around in a bar filled with young people dressed in a sort of young-people-going-out uniform of loose button-down shirts and flouncy little skirts.

On the train home, a guy in my car with a guitar and his rowdy friends (who were, apparently, thrown out of a Yankee's game for peeing in the stadium) were taking requests shouted mostly from a group of rowdy blonde girls sitting behind me. They played rousing versions of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Fuck Her Gently" that had the whole car singing along and drumming on the seats.