A New Hobby: Me and Tahquitz

Well, with much added concern to my mother, I have once again undertaken another hobby: rock climbing. My friend, Paul Frankenberger, at church has climbed for approaching 30 years, and he is a major contributor to my new found passion. In late April, 2011, Paul took me down to Mission Valley just East of San Diego where we spent the entire day rock climbing. Here he introduced me to the amazing sport of lead climbing. In most climbing the rope runs from the person on the ground, through an anchor above, and then attaches to the climber. This is called top-roping. Lead climbing, on the other hand, is when the climber climbs above his anchor point. This technique is used when a person cannot walk up around the rock to set up a top rope, and is used in order to scale peaks and large rocks. Here is a picture of me before my first lead climb, with all of Paul's anchor gear to make my way up the rock. It was thrilling.

This is a picture of me setting my first anchor. Just after this picture, climbing above my first anchor, the adrenaline really started. It was a crazy feeling to climb above my safety point. By the end of the day, I was really interested in continuing, and so we did.

In late September, Paul took me for a multi-pitch climb up Tahquitz Rock in Idylwild, California. Tahquitz Rock has a long standing history in American rock climbing. The sport really began to develop here before moving to Yosemite where is has become world famous. Actually, the Yosemite Decimal System of rating climbing route difficulties began at this rock. The decimal system uses 5.# to rate the climbs from 5.1 (very easy) to 5.12d, and it continues to grow as rock climbing develops. As part of starting my blog, I wanted to use it to share my new climbing adventures. My goal in climbing is to climb a peak this coming summer, and someday scale the peak of Grand Teton in Wyoming. It's a big dream, but I'm slowly working towards it and enjoying every minute. Here are some of the pictures from our day on Tahquitz.

This is at the top of our first pitch before I started lead climbing our second pitch. In between pitches you make sure to each anchor to the wall for security while you prepare for the next pitch. At this point we were about 100' above the ground. 

This is lead climbing our second or third pitch. In all we had 5 pitches, the last two of which were somewhat less than vertical through the upper cracks of the rock. Those were the easiest part of the day. 

After starting around 9:30, we made it to the top around 4pm. From the top we could see clear to Saddleback Mtn near were we live about 60 miles away or more. We could almost see the Ocean, but it was hard to distinguish between it and the sky from that far away.

The view of Tahquitz Rock from the roadway below. We basically climbed straight up the rock just to the left of the right most tree in this picture.