2008 Woodie Awards
The highest we ever got
The Weekly's own Jakob Wartman ascends (sort of) with Macaleser's climbing club
By: Jakob Wartman
Issue date: 9/28/07 Section: Sports
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Showing up to climbing club on time is a mistake. My advice for anyone who plans on joining the group which meets at 6:45 p.m. every Tuesday, is to show up a little early. I came on time and was informed that I had just missed the belaying class on the side of Doty.
Adam Bidwell '11 had taken it upon himself to demonstrate belaying by removing the screen and climbing down from his third story Doty dorm room.
"Apparently the RHD didn't think that it was structurally safe to be climbing up the side of Doty," Bidwell said. "A lot of people thought I was just going to jump out my window."
Climbing has been around since man saw a mountain and decided that it would be an admirable goal to scale it. There is evidence of men climbing rocks depicted in Chinese watercolors from 400 B.C. But climbing as a sport didn't really take off until the last quarter of the 19th century when English, Germans and Italians couldn't get enough of it.
Now climbing is a worldwide sport that exists anywhere there are climbable rocks or even where there aren't. It is a sport of endurance, determination, and precise calculation. Climbing tests the body's strength, agility, and coordination, all while the body hangs precariously on a precipice. It is a sport that is, frankly, not for the faint of heart.
The 30 or so students who gathered outside Weyerhauser were not faint of heart, but I was. Raised in Minnesota I have become one with the flat earth and am a firm believer in adhering to the guiding laws of gravity (mainly the -9.8 m/s2 that is constantly acting on us).
Maggie McKenna '08 and Sophia Kast '08 were my "guides" for the night and after we had shuffled into various cars and the one van provided by the school, we were off. We managed to fit five comfortably in McKenna's Subaru and I rode in back listening to Bidwell and McKenna discuss climbing gear and other technical stuff that sounded more like quantum mechanics than climbing, but by the sixth mention of finger jamming we had arrived.
Adam Bidwell '11 had taken it upon himself to demonstrate belaying by removing the screen and climbing down from his third story Doty dorm room.
"Apparently the RHD didn't think that it was structurally safe to be climbing up the side of Doty," Bidwell said. "A lot of people thought I was just going to jump out my window."
Climbing has been around since man saw a mountain and decided that it would be an admirable goal to scale it. There is evidence of men climbing rocks depicted in Chinese watercolors from 400 B.C. But climbing as a sport didn't really take off until the last quarter of the 19th century when English, Germans and Italians couldn't get enough of it.
Now climbing is a worldwide sport that exists anywhere there are climbable rocks or even where there aren't. It is a sport of endurance, determination, and precise calculation. Climbing tests the body's strength, agility, and coordination, all while the body hangs precariously on a precipice. It is a sport that is, frankly, not for the faint of heart.
The 30 or so students who gathered outside Weyerhauser were not faint of heart, but I was. Raised in Minnesota I have become one with the flat earth and am a firm believer in adhering to the guiding laws of gravity (mainly the -9.8 m/s2 that is constantly acting on us).
Maggie McKenna '08 and Sophia Kast '08 were my "guides" for the night and after we had shuffled into various cars and the one van provided by the school, we were off. We managed to fit five comfortably in McKenna's Subaru and I rode in back listening to Bidwell and McKenna discuss climbing gear and other technical stuff that sounded more like quantum mechanics than climbing, but by the sixth mention of finger jamming we had arrived.
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