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REACHING FOR THE SKY |
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When Hillary and Tenzing struggled to the summit of Mt Everest in 1952 they brought their sport of mountaineering to as high a peak as Lindbergh had ever done for aviation a quarter of a century before. Climbing schools sprang up on rock climbing than on the skills of mountaineering itself. |
| Mountaineering, to many, seems like
trudging in deep snow up a mountain, the goal being the summit. The
objective in rock climbing is quite different: it is in the style
of the climb, the movement of getting there, and the satisfaction
of rappelling down afterwards. Rock climbers don't care if they reach
a summit. It's like that old saw: it's the journey not the destination. |
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If you live far from a mountain range
you can go rock climbing on walls of artificial stone or on topographical
faults. Or if you're Sylvester Stallone creating "Cliffhanger"
you can make for the Italian Dolomite Alps, or if you're Tom Cruise
in "Mission Impossible 2" you can hang out, literally, in
Dead Horse in Moab, Utah. But if you're lucky enough to live in Southern
California you can head for Joshua Tree National Monument. There you
might find yourself standing before a rock face amongst a group of
students with Vertical Adventures of Newport Beach. And hearing Bob
Gaines, the leader, addressing the novice climbers fidgeting amongst
the tall red rocks.
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| "A lot of students come to rock climbing with trepidation," he says, "yet we'll show you it's a sport that's safe, fun and rewarding. | |
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Gaines hasn't had a student injured in the seventeen years he's run Vertical Adventures, and he's trained about 15,000 climbers in that time. He was Sylvester Stallone's private instructor and movie safety coordinator in the Dolomites while filming "Cliffhanger." |
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"I was introduced to the sport by its literature," Gaines says, "a real teenage armchair climber but constantly the forbidding rock face of El Capitan beckoned."
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