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The gym caters to everyone from beginners to experts, and for the former it’s a real confidence booster. The more experienced make do with limited finger-tip BETWEEN A ROCK AND holds, but I made it to the top every time by utilizing A REAL HARD PLACE some of the simpler color-coded routes. Holds on these continued from previous page routes are both larger and closer together, and the experience, while strenuous and occasionally nerve-wracking, isn’t all that different from climbing a ladder.
The Alapocas Wall
Alas, the self-assurance I gained at the Delaware Rock Gym ebbed away when I showed up at Alapocas Run for a park-sponsored introductory rock-climbing course on a beautiful Saturday morning in early July. I’d seen photographs of that wall of Wilmington blue rock—the remains of a quarrying operation that ended, according to Liza Androskaut, one of the course’s two instructors/belayers, in the late 1930s or early ‘40s. But it was much more intimidating in person. I can only liken it to seeing a photo of Yao Ming, the 7 ft. 6 in. former center for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, and then actually meeting him—and discovering you only come up to his navel. But that wasn’t what scared me most. I’d anticipated that climbing at Alapocas Run would be easier than climbing indoors, for the simple reason that the walls at the gym go straight up, whereas most of the climbing routes at the park don’t. But here’s the thing; while the hand- and foot-holds at the rock gym were user-friendly and plentiful, a close look convinced me that such was not the case at Alapocas. And if that wasn’t enough to put the frighteners to me, the pre-climb safety lecture delivered by Androskaut was. Her brutally blunt lecture on falling rocks (“If somebody shouts ‘Rock!,’ don’t look up, it may hit you in the face. Just do your best to make yourself smaller.”) was sobering. And her equally chilling warnings about copperhead snakes and poison ivy made me wish I were someplace safer, like the Vietnam War. But it was too late to turn back, if only because this magazine had sent a photographer along and I didn’t want the only photos taken to be of me fleeing the scene. Nor did I want the other three guys taking the course to think I was chicken. And then there was the registration fee. I was to be reimbursed, but I wasn’t sure that applied in cases of outright desertion. So I donned my harness and helmet, said my prayers, and tried Mike Little (orange shorts) and others receive pre-climb into soothe myself by listening to struction from Liz Androskaut. Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” on the MP3 player that is my brain. Except it kept shuffling tracks to Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Very disconcerting. There were three roped routes to the top. The one on the left was clearly beyond my capacities, while the one to the far right entailed ascending a sheer face of seemingly hold-free rock that would have had Spiderman saying, “Are you kidding me?”
Paid to be Foolhardy
Which left the middle route, which I knew was possible because I’d watched our group’s only teen climber make it up before me. But he’d overcome several treacherous-looking obstacles in the process, and his very real travails ate away a bit more at my already low self-confidence. But I get paid to do the foolhardy, and I wasn’t about to let the queasy anticipation of imminent doom stand in the way of following through with a dubious life choice. No, I commenced climbing, and, slowly but methodically, I made progress. As expected, good holds were hard to come by, and making headway meant scrambling up steep inclines and hoping my feet didn’t slide out from under me. This was takeyour-chances mountain goat climbing, and I’m no mountain goat.
70 AUGUST 2018 | OUTANDABOUTNOW.COM
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7/26/18 10:28 AM