Climbing in the Garden of the Gods

There was a time last summer where if I didn’t spend Monday and Tuesday in severe pain from whatever I did on Saturday and Sunday, I considered it a weekend wasted. Then winter came and I got lazy - but now I’m back, doing actual cool things! My parents got me a Groupon for a group guided climbing trip with Front Range Climbing Company last year, and I completely lucked out and the other three people in my group cancelled. I was a little concerned about being stuck in a group of newbies who lack my capacity for handling exposure and heights and who took hours to do one route, but I found myself in a one-on-one climbing lesson in the Garden of the Gods with an experienced guide called Logan.

We did a series of 5.7 climbs - not the iconic New Era, which had a queue, but some respectable climbs nonetheless. We started on Montezuma’s Tower, where we climbed the North Ridge, followed by West Point Crack on South Gateway Rock; we climbed Potholes on the Red Spire, scrambled up Tourist Trap Gully (so named because of tourists’ habit of climbing it and getting stuck, requiring formal rescue) and rappelled down the west face of North Gateway Rock.

I also got to try rappelling for the first time, which I took to fairly easily. Halfway down my first rappel off Montezuma’s Tower, I was bouncing down the wall like Batman.

Potholes was an technically easy but physically strenuous climb up a spire in the middle of a pavilion. I gathered an audience and got a round of applause upon reaching the top, and took a bow to cheers down at the bottom. The crown jewel of the day was the aforementioned 175-foot rappel from North Gateway Rock, which included 15-20 feet of free-rappelling.

The long blue and yellow strips of fabric wrapped around my waist and torso are called (I think) webbing, and you can hang off of them - they are deceptively strong. So are the quick draws, the shorter pieces of fabric with each end attached to a carabiner; each can withstand 6,000 pounds of force! The little bell-shaped device in the front is called an ATC, an acronym that stands for, believe it or not, “air traffic controller,” and is used for belaying and rappelling.

I wanted a doofy picture of myself pretending to hold up this rock formation, but I had nobody to take it - one of the downsides of solo adventuring.

UPDATE (Monday): Can’t move my arms. Summer’s here!