"Who knew I would tap into climbing manuvers during home improvement? Actually, you should see me pruning the trees (Sometimes I'm too lazy to climb down and move the ladder. Often, I think, 'So this is how people fall off ladders and get hurt...')"

--Sandra

As I mentioned earlier, when our climbing ladies took to the hills and cliffs of Lower West Bolton, I discovered something I hadn't suspected in the gym, namely that I lack a fundamental fear of heights and falling from them while on a rope. I had not suspected this before going outside because of my initial reluctance to let go of the gym wall while suspended 30 feet above the ground. In retrospect, I feel this is due mainly to the brain's tendency to get overinvolved in what the body is up to. As long as you can tell the brain to take off and let a body do what a body can do, life gets much easier.

I'm sure this will be problematic at some point later, but for now I have decided to put my fearlessness to good use and go back to practicing some lead climbing. Lead climbing is where you pull your rope up with you as you go, clipping the rope into carabiners along the route, whereas a top rope is something you crawl up while it's anchored to the top of the route for you. Lead climbing has the possibility of bigger falls bcause if you're unable to clip in at a place, you fall all the way past the last place you clipped, plus however much you were above it.

Work with me, there will be pictures later.

The weekend after we went to Bolton, I headed back into the gym to do some lead climbing, and wound up taking my first real good fall on lead, which we estimated at 8, maybe 10 feet. This is nothing in the world of climbing. This is a mere misstep, a trifle, a casual bounce. A few days later, my belay partner Claire had her son climbing on lead; his left hand let go just as he was about to clip into the ceiling and she saw her whole life (and her son's feet) flash before her eyes as he fell 25 feet.

But sadly I have not been doing much lead climbing lately, it just hasn't been in the cards. There's been top-rope climbing and bouldering, and this past Tuesday when it was 93F in Burlington and while we had been scheduled to climb, indoors, in a converted poorly ventilated warehouse, we all just sweated into the phone and called it.

Actually, cool story. I didn't even make it to PetraCliffs, because it was so hot and I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before because there had been thunderstorms, and while I love me some thunder and lightning, the Princess, She Who Hops On the Pillows, hates thunderstorms, and so spent much of Monday night jumping up and down on my head and knocking things off shelves. Long night. Very tired. Very hot on Tuesday. Call PetraCliffs on the off-chance that they could locate my climbing partners and y'all? I didn't even have to use their last names. We are now Known to PetraCliffs. Whoever answered the phone was like, "Sure! They're standing right here! You wanna talk to them?" We have so arrived, and it is so much better than Cheers.

What? Okay, but it was a cool story for me.