What is Rock Climbing?

It’s only the best sport ever, of course! It truly is an amazing activity to participate in. The basic definition of rock climbing is simply the sport in which participants climb up, down, or across a natural rock wall or artificially made one. In one way or another, there are different routes marked that a climber can follow. These routes are usually marked by color of the holds in indoor climbing gyms, and all routes are also labeled off of difficulty. The main goal of climbing is to start where indicated on the wall and if not indicated, you usually just start climbing from the bottom of the wall, and get to an intended marker or destination, which often is somewhere on top of the wall you are climbing. Sizes and shapes of holds including pinches, crimps, jugs, and more, often contribute to how hard a climb is. Other factors such as rock material, steepness of the wall, overhangs, and much more can also contribute to how hard climbing a route may be.

When climbing, there are a couple of equipment items that are used with every type of climbing. The first item is climbing shoes, which are tight shoes your feet that often give you a better feel and grip onto foot holds onto the wall. There is also chalk which its sole purpose to help give you better grip onto the hold of the route you are climbing. Another main point to mention is that there are two main types of climbing, and are the only two offered in climbing gyms: bouldering and top rope.

Top Rope

The first type of climbing that often comes to mind when hearing “rock climbing” is top rope. Two new equipment items are required for this type of climbing: a harness and a rope. A harness is an item that wraps around your waist and each of your legs, and is intended to be attached to a rope, and when it does this, it can support your body without tearing. The rope is wrapped around some sort of anchor at the top of the wall and the two ends hang to the floor where one person ties into their harness, and the other person clips into some sort of belay device whose purpose is to catch the person climbing from falling by stopping the rope from moving. Through this system someone can fall from even 100s of feet up in the air, and never get hurt by a rope simply catching them and letting them fall only possibly 5 feet in the air, never hitting the ground. When top roping, the routes are labeled all the way from 5.5-5.15 in difficulty, with it going from easiest to hardest as the numbers increase. Usually with this type, you just climb from the ground up to the top of the wall or where indicated.

Bouldering

When top roping you can climb all the way from 40ft to hundreds of feet tall, but bouldering is far different in a lot of ways, including this. When bouldering you usually only climb up to 15 or 20ft. This type of climbing includes no rope and harness, and so when you fall, you just fall to the ground, or in most situations, thick matts that ease your impact. The difficulty rating for bouldering go from V0-V17, although most people fall into the V0-V8 range. It is the same thing where higher the number is harder the climb. With these routes being so short, they often have harder moves, grips, and techniques you have to use than top rope, since top rope requires more endurance.