Pull-ups & Toproping

As most of you know, Alex & I have been getting into climbing this past year. We became members of the City Climbers Club which has a climbing gym on 59th St in one of the city recreation centers. We have also been bouldering in Central Park as the spring weather has been quite lovely. Thanks to our wonderful friend Adam, who insisted he continue his daily regimen of pull-ups while visiting us last year, we have a rock pull-up bar in our door way to work on our upper body strength. This is something that Alex & I were severely lacking. After many months, I am finally capable of doing a pull up on my own!

Alex has some experience with outdoor climbing from his UCSB Outdoor Adventure Program days. He use to lead climbing trips and was in charge of setting up top ropes for the group. We have slowly been accumulating climbing equipment so that we could go outdoors and do some roped climbs. This past weekend we finally purchased the last items, climbing helmets and belay devices, and set out to Harriman State Park. We took the same train we take most weekends when we go running and hiked in about 30 mins from the train station. Alex has been scoping this cliffs out for many months and just last weekend we saw a dad and son with a rope set up doing some climbing. It turns out this guy use to climb in Harriman all the time 20 something years ago but gave up climbing to have a family. Apparently it use to be a pretty popular climbing spot, but Alex & I have never seen anyone there over the past 3 years. All the climbers go to the gunks, a famous climbing spot outside New Paltz, NY. So we had the rocks to ourselves and we set out setting up a top rope to try out our climbing skills and Alex’s old climbing knowledge. We set up a toprope at 2 different spots and ended up climbing around on the cliffs for the entire morning and afternoon. Don’t worry moms and dads we wore our helmets the entire time and we were always very safe! Check out some more photos of us below.

This is a view of the cliffs that we were climbing