Learning to Climb Outdoors
You’re crushing it in the gym. You’re pushing your grade on toprope, maybe even dabbling in the lead routes. It’s awesome, it’s the most fun you’ve ever had, you’re in love, what could be better! One day after sending your proj, you take a seat to relax and revel in your victory. Ahhhh, that was sick. You think to yourself that you deserve a beer. But gazing up at the fluorescent lighting, a realization begins to dawn…. I’m in a warehouse. I can hear the street traffic, I can smell the city. I thought this was supposed to be an adventure! I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the great adventurers of old. The existential crisis begins. You feel the walls closing in on you. It wasn’t supposed to be like this! Nooooooooo.
You snap back to reality.
“I should really do some outdoor climbing,” you say to yourself as you pick up your chalk back and jog back over to join your buddies.
The good news is you’re most of the way there already- climbing outside is really not THAT much different from climbing indoors. In fact you can learn how to sport climb in as little as a day. A couple of ways to do this- one is to tag along with some sport climbing buddies and learn the tricks of the trade, another is to hire a guide to teach you the AMGA standard methods. If you are looking for what skills specifically are most important during the transition from indoor to outdoor climbing, you are in the right place. Here’s my list.
Clipping Quickdraws. The bread and butter of outdoor climbing. Clip a thousand draws, then clip a thousand more with the opposite hand. Clip another thousand upside down, and you will have achieved sport climber nirvana. Learn what a back-clip is and how not to do it, the same goes for a Z-clip. Do mock leads, trailing a pseudo-leadline to practice clipping draws while being embraced in the warm hug of a taught toprope.
Fall Practice. Climbing outside is scary. Leading outside is scarier than leading in the gym. Exposure, the grail that many grisled trad dads live to drink from, is also a terrifying prospect to many new outdoor climbers. But like anything else, you get used to it. Take a few practice falls with the quickdraw at your chest, then a few more with it at your waist, then knees and so on until you are taking social media-worthy whippers with confidence.
Anchor building. Say you want to toprope your local crag, or build a quick anchor at the chains at the top of a sport climb. You should have a couple of go-to methods under your belt. One of my favorite sport anchors to teach new climbers is the Quad. It is easy to build, uses just a sling and some lockers, and could hold a VW bus. Learn it. The easiest option is simply two OPPOSING quickdraws at the chains. For bonus safety use one locker draw and one regular draw. These are options when the climb has chain anchors. Without chains, things get a little more complicated. A post for another day.
Anchor Cleaning. You built your Quad, you and your friends have climbed the route, and it’s time to move on. How do you safely clean your anchor and thread the rope through the chains to be lowered? There are some good videos online about this process. Maybe one called something like, How To Clean a Sport Anchor. Maybe by someone like IFMGA guide Dale Remsberg. Hint hint, nudge nudge. After cleaning an anchor, always have your partner LOWER you, rather than going off belay and rappelling down the route. Having this step as the default can help prevent potentially disastrous miscommunications between climber and belayer. Cleaning a sport anchor should be a very safe and straightforward process.
Master these techniques and you will soon be climbing under the sun, clouds, and stars, broken free from the corrugated garage door prison that you used to call your climbing gym. (We’re mostly kidding. We climb at the gym too, climbing gyms are by far the most awesomest kind of gyms.)