Encountering obstacles to getting into a sport like isn’t exactly unusual. You're not likely to have the right gear, you don’t know where to go and when you do get out there, you don’t know what you’re doing. Just to add insult to injury, none of your friends are climbers.
Oh, and then there’s that little detail of weather – rain and rock climbing don’t exactly go hand in hand. I was one of the lucky ones, growing up in the 1990s when outward bounds trips for high schoolers were still publicly funded, and I had my first taste of getting as a young teenager in the mountains of Scotland. I kept it up at a local indoor climbing wall for a few months, then went off to university and it would be over a decade till I squeezed my feet into a pair of again.
When I moved to Colorado in my late 20s, my friends spent their summers at the crag, so I quickly got myself a , helmet and shoes and spent the next ten years making up for lost time by around Colorado and Utah. I was fortunate to have friends who were pretty good climbers show me the ropes, literally, but needless to say I picked up some bad habits along the way, as we usually do when we learn from friends. Add to that the fact that, since moving back to Scotland, I’ve failed to find a climbing community, largely due to my own lack of trying, and I’m getting a little rusty.
So when I was offered the chance to attend this year’s Arc’teryx Climb Academy, I jumped. This edition of the outdoor brand’s Academy .