This blog covers the climbing trips we will go on to, but I would also like to write about my climbing in Norway in general.

So far we have only had one official climbing lesson. We discussed about whether we’d prefer to be split in groups randomly or sorted by so far climbing skills. While climbing surely is the subject I could share and teach the most, simply because it’s the sport I practice the most, am the most interested in and feel the most competent at, it is also the subject I have the greatest ambition to improve in.  While some preferred the random approach where everybody could learn from everybody, I was therefore really happy we split into groups according to pre-skills.

We started the first lesson off by catching up on knots. I realised how difficult it can be tying knots that I usually only tie to my harness simply on the plain rope. This made me practice a lot of knots I had thought to know perfectly fine in different circumstances, like around a stick or onto my hand. I hereby definitely improved my clove hitch and boulin. I also discovered that, of course, all knots have different names in different languages. The importance of being on the same level about climbing slang also got very clear to me when we privately went on a weekend climbing trip. On guy was about to fall into the rope pretty close to the ground so he shouted “take!”, meaning that the belayer should take in rope to shorten the fall. The belayer, not having used English climbing slang before, did not know what “take” in that sense meant and even started to give out rope for a short time, of course making the climber panic. This does not go to give any blame to someone, but I simply learned how important it is to be on the same page concerning the most basic but most important climbing vocabular before you start climbing. The responsibility therefore, I think, lies upon the belayer as well as on the climber. Fortunately, the two in this incident were not alone and people on the ground could help the belayer so that the fall ended up being save.

— more to come as we hopefully have more climbing lessons —