The 42 Climbs Project
It has been an old dream of mine to celebrate something with climbing, a concentration and strength-sport activity that matches effort with fun. To celebrate the 42nd anniversary of our spiritual tutor's arrival to the West, Charita, Dharmaputri, Elke and I decided to climb 42 climbing routes. Since it was the closest to our N.Y. headquarters, and also because on the first day the weather wasn't nice at all, we drove to an indoor climbing centre on Long Island.
For the sake of the non-initiated ones: by indoor routes I mean vertical routes, basically sets of coloured hand and footholds specially designed and screwed on (almost) vertical and overhanging walls. There are routes of various difficulty degree (the degrees are numbered differently on the different continents), according to how many and how big or how ”easy-to-hold-on-to” these grips are. There may be several routes built on the same section of the wall, it is their colour or the colour of the stripe underneath that distinguishes one route from another. Once you start climbing one of them, you may touch holds of that colour only.
For safety reasons climbers use ropes and special belaying devices. In this case, three of us travelling from another continent with an already big luggage, we had not had much gear with us, except for our harnesses, shoes and chalk bags (chalk being needed to prevent our sweaty hands from slipping off the small or rounded holds). Therefore we could only use the ropes and gri-gris (a belaying device that blocks the rope in case the climber falls) pre-installed and did only top-roping (the rope comes from above, one end of it being attached to the climber's harness, while its other end being held end pulled in or fed out through a gri-gri by the belaying person; it is considered that easiest and safest way).
The participants include (in alphabetical order): Charita (the young spider of El Salvador, a particularly talented beginner with very nice, light, long and wide moves), Dharmaputri (the tough lady of the Swiss Alps and Mont Blanc, conqueror of many alpine summits including some north faces), Elke W. (who has thus made a successful return to the climbing world she left some years ago with very good results in her bag – routes of degree 7a-c on the European scale) and my humble self, Kamalika (a not particularly remarkable climber if a climber at all, but definitely a great lover of the altitudes and of the vertical world regardless of whether it consists of rock, of the compressed ice of a glacier or of the frozen ice of a waterfall).
The first occasion three of us climbed (”on-sight”) 6 routes each. The second occasion Dharmaputri joined us and again we had to climb 6 routes each in order to have 42 all together. Of course we transcended this a bit. Also, the other three girls did a bit of difficult bouldering, but we did not count those shorter but much harder boulder routes.
We are fully conscious that none of the climbs illustrated here would make a headline in the alpine or climbing magazines, nevertheless we sweated a lot, we had great fun and all of us made more or less progress in improving our technique and style. Actually that was the point in doing it, with these climbs we lived what Sri Chinmoy teaches us: improve yourself, transcend yourself, do not compete with others but with yourself – and be happy.
I hope to be able to say that this was a pilot-project (testing the thing) and now that we saw that IT WORKS, it will be followed by more.
For the sake of the non-initiated ones: by indoor routes I mean vertical routes, basically sets of coloured hand and footholds specially designed and screwed on (almost) vertical and overhanging walls. There are routes of various difficulty degree (the degrees are numbered differently on the different continents), according to how many and how big or how ”easy-to-hold-on-to” these grips are. There may be several routes built on the same section of the wall, it is their colour or the colour of the stripe underneath that distinguishes one route from another. Once you start climbing one of them, you may touch holds of that colour only.
For safety reasons climbers use ropes and special belaying devices. In this case, three of us travelling from another continent with an already big luggage, we had not had much gear with us, except for our harnesses, shoes and chalk bags (chalk being needed to prevent our sweaty hands from slipping off the small or rounded holds). Therefore we could only use the ropes and gri-gris (a belaying device that blocks the rope in case the climber falls) pre-installed and did only top-roping (the rope comes from above, one end of it being attached to the climber's harness, while its other end being held end pulled in or fed out through a gri-gri by the belaying person; it is considered that easiest and safest way).
The participants include (in alphabetical order): Charita (the young spider of El Salvador, a particularly talented beginner with very nice, light, long and wide moves), Dharmaputri (the tough lady of the Swiss Alps and Mont Blanc, conqueror of many alpine summits including some north faces), Elke W. (who has thus made a successful return to the climbing world she left some years ago with very good results in her bag – routes of degree 7a-c on the European scale) and my humble self, Kamalika (a not particularly remarkable climber if a climber at all, but definitely a great lover of the altitudes and of the vertical world regardless of whether it consists of rock, of the compressed ice of a glacier or of the frozen ice of a waterfall).
The first occasion three of us climbed (”on-sight”) 6 routes each. The second occasion Dharmaputri joined us and again we had to climb 6 routes each in order to have 42 all together. Of course we transcended this a bit. Also, the other three girls did a bit of difficult bouldering, but we did not count those shorter but much harder boulder routes.
We are fully conscious that none of the climbs illustrated here would make a headline in the alpine or climbing magazines, nevertheless we sweated a lot, we had great fun and all of us made more or less progress in improving our technique and style. Actually that was the point in doing it, with these climbs we lived what Sri Chinmoy teaches us: improve yourself, transcend yourself, do not compete with others but with yourself – and be happy.
I hope to be able to say that this was a pilot-project (testing the thing) and now that we saw that IT WORKS, it will be followed by more.
