About this time my friend Jordan and his brother started getting into
rock climbing and they took Rob and I along one day. That got Rob
excited about it so he invested in some climbing equipment that he
didn't use as often as I would like, so to make sure that the gear
was getting the proper amount of attention I decided to pitch in and
use it for him whenever possible. It was pretty much always possible.
After we caught the bug Cole, Jordan, and I were up the canyon that
was near our houses climbing several days a week. When we started out
the resources were pretty thin consisting of a few carabiners, some
carabiner and strap sets called quick-draws, or just 'draws if you
were bad-A, and we were bad-A. We had a rope, a belay device called
a figure 8 and a few harnesses and that was about it but that is all
we needed because we were young with time to kill so having some
fancy shoes that would help you climb the rock better didn't seem
like they would be worth the $80 investment. At first we would go up
and climb a group of three routes that were right off the road and
then maybe go do some rappelling off of the aptly named rappelling
wall. As the years went on most of the other guys stayed somewhere
between mildly and somewhat interested and Cole and I were the only
ones in our group of friends who stuck with it and eventually bought
some real gear and actually worked at getting better. I have, in my
more robust and pasty dough like body of adulthood given up climbing
and I think Cole is the only one of my contemporaries still in the
game. I tell you all this as a framework for what we got up to for
the next four years always seemed to have climbing involved or
related somehow.
