Forty feet up a sheer cliff, body sweating, forearms pumping, I pull my waist toward the wall for better balance, and stretch out my left arm, reaching for the next hold. I grasp it and stretch my left leg toward the next ledge for my foot. I find a minuscule notch in the rockface and wedge my toe onto it. I scan the wall for my next right-hand hold when suddenly, my left toe slips. I quickly push off the wall, as I fall feet first into the warm water of the river.
Rock climbing has gained serious popularity in the past few years, fueled by the success of Jimmy Chin’s documentary “Free Solo,” featuring Alex Honnold. Honnold flawlessly scales a route on the 3,000-foot cliff of Yosemite’s El Capitan in about four hours with no protective equipment holding him to the rock face. While this was certainly an incredibly noteworthy feat, it isn’t the only climb that deserves to break into mainstream culture. Since it is the only part of climbing that many people know about, many people think climbing is much more dangerous and inaccessible than it really is.
The reality is that most people, even the best in the world, climb with a harness and rope and a belayer ready to catch them if they fall. This is true of another Alex. Last month Alex Megos became the first climber to complete Bibliographie, a route in Céüse, France that he rates at 5.15d, the highest difficulty level recognized in the sport. The only other route with this rating, Silence, was climbed by Adam Ondra in 2017 and hasn’t been climbed by anyone since.
Climbing is an exciting and quickly growing sport worldwide, and you don’t have to travel to Yosemite, France or Norway, or be a world-class athlete, to get a taste of it.
The opening anecdote came when I was deep water soloing (a style of rock climbing) last weekend. Some friends and I were on the cliff below the Hunter Art Museum, right above the Tennessee River. In fact, Chattanooga is one of the climbing meccas for the southeastern United States. There are many crags within a thirty-minute drive and countless crags within a couple of hours of Covenant.
If you are interested in exploring the groundbreaking, increasingly popular sport of climbing, or just want to find a COVID-safe, outdoor outlet to test your strength and endurance, there is a climbing community here at Covenant. The Climbing Club is a place where you can learn about the sport from experienced climbers and get to use expensive equipment for free on club-sponsored trips.
This semester, due to COVID-19 rules, the club is not allowed to make any official trips off-campus, but it is trying to restore an on-campus climbing wall near the cross country trails, and will be taking short trips to boulders and cliffs that can be hiked to from campus. The climbing community is a welcoming one, and college is a great place to try out a new sport.