Encountering obstacles to getting into a sport like rock climbing 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 on belay 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 climbing shoes again.
