After two days of canoeing with the kids on the Ellesmere College Adventure Plus holiday activities club, it was time for a change. Last Summer I did some indoor bouldering with the groups, which was followed up with a visit to the indoor climbing wall at Plas Madoc at Easter. It seemed like a natural progression to finally head outside to climb on some real rock.
Knowing that each group would be doing two half day sessions of rock climbing, I opted to visit Trevor Quarry today. With a short (although steep) walk in, a useful area for bouldering and a relatively short set of climbs, it’s an ideal place to introduce people to rock climbing. The fact that it provides some awesome views is a great bonus as well.
We started off with some time bouldering in pairs so that there was always a ‘spotter’ for each climber. The crag at Trevor Quarry has a fantastic outcrop of rock which lends itself so well to a traverse (ie. moving sideways rather than up). This is a great way of getting people used to moving on rock without having to worry about height, harnesses, ropes and belaying. However, it’s interesting to note that when people find it hard to move across, they naturally want to go up rather than down in the search for alternative holds.
After a good warm up, it was time to start some slightly more serious climbing with ropes and all. The groups worked in teams of four with one climber being looked after or belayed by the other three. I only set up two climbs, but this was enough to keep them engaged and challenged. One of the climbs I’d selected was relatively straight forward, giving everyone the chance to climb to the top of the crag if they wanted to go that far. Not everyone did, but I feel it’s important that no one feels forced into doing anything they don’t feel comfortable with. I selected the second climb because it had a very tricky start that caused many of the group a few problems. This meant that even those that were very nervous about going to any great height, could be challenged by the difficulty of the climb rather than limited by their fear of the height.
As well as some great climbing, we were also fortunate with the weather. It was a pretty unsettled day but, to my amazement, all the showers passed us by. We were able to just sit as the crag and watch the rain pass us by. I’ve been incredibly fortunate with the weather recently – it can’t last forever!
