The most intense experience I had during my week of vacation was the “High Ropes Course”. This is a 15-20 foot long log with notches in it hanging from a chain that you climb(Yes it swings while you are climbing). At the top of the log you switch to a rock climbing wall with itty bitty little plastic rocks to acend another 20 feet or so. Once you’ve achieved the wooden platform 40 feet off the ground you take to the wires. These are 1 inch thick wires strung 50 to 100 feet between trees. One wire for hanging onto, one wire for walking on. After a circuit of wire walking you arrive back at the wooden platform where you rappel down the climbing wall and the empty space below it.
I actually did all of that. I still wonder why. It was definitely interesting from an introspective psychological standpoint. I KNEW it was going to be a terrifying experience. I knew that before I started. Yet I wanted to do it. To face my fears I guess. Perhaps to prove that I am stronger than my fear. That’s the answer that pleases me. The answer that I want to believe. Maybe it is even the right answer.
During the experience there was a definite split between my animal brain and my logical one. I was wearing a climbing harness with double safety the entire time. During the climbing and rappelling there was a staff member on a belay line who could have hoisted me with no effort on my part. Logically I knew I couldn’t fall. Despite that, I was terrified throughout the entire experience. In order to not be frozen by the fear I had to concentrate on movements. Specifically the NEXT movement. Hand. Foot. Breathe.
When I arrived back on the ground my first reaction was “I’m NEVER doing that again!” Ten minutes later I was reconsidering. I’m curious. Now that my adrenal system has figured out that I survived what looked like a deadly situation would I be as scared the next time? Part of me wants to know. Part of me doesn’t want to be that scared again.
Howard took pictures and video. I saw them later. They are far too short. Surely it took longer than that for me to climb. And why doesn’t the fear I felt show in the motions or expressions? I’d post a picture or two if I knew how, but as far as I’m concerned they don’t accurately represent the experience.
I’m very glad I went through the course. I’m glad to know that in a faux do-or-die situation, I did it. The doing is enough, I don’t need to buy the t-shirt.
Re: Cool. 😀
That sounded like fun, if slightly terrifying fun – and it does sound like you enjoyed it, at least in a ‘somewhat insane’ sort of way. It also gives you something to use on the kids later, if they say anything about you not doing anything.
Just show them the video. 😀
Re: I’m impressed..
Don’t know if I could do that, I am such a wimp about heights. Let’s just say I think I’d be keeping the instructor with the belay line awfully busy if I tried that 🙂
Bravo to you for having the guts to try 🙂
Re: Congratulations!
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that.
Not because I’m afraid of heights, but because my upper arm strength is so crappy that I’m bad at climbing. I could never do those rope-climbing exercises in gym class. Not even on the ones with knots. 😀
Re: Congratulations!
Actually, upper-arm strength isn’t nearly as important as you’d think. You have to learn how to use your legs for most of the work, or even if you’re among the buffest of upper-bodied types you won’t make it up.
–Howard
Isn’t that only when rappeling? With just climbing a robe at school, where you don’t get a wall, I thought the upper body strength was the key factor in that case.
Re: Additional thoughts
I once read an article, probably in Discover, about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was talking specifically about traffic accidents and how the surge of adrenaline seems to make time slow down and somehow both improves and interferes with memory production so that segments of the experience seem etched into the brain in high resolution, while other stuff was blurred or lost entirely. The theory was that PTSD is actually the primitive brain’s way of trying to maximize survival. You relive the experience so that you ingrain the way you survived and can do it again instinctively.
It was a fascinating article. It was even more fascinating to watch that process taking place inside my own head as I went through the course and then assimilated the experience afterward.
This was a climbing pole and a climbing wall, both of which had hand- and foot-holds. While you can’t climb it with JUST your feet (it would be “stairs”), you CAN do most of the lifting with your legs, using your arms and hands to hold you in place while you move a leg to someplace you can push from.
–Howard
Re: Nevermind
I reread it – she was climbing the log suspended from a chain. In that case, yeah, there’d be footholds to use – or at the very least one could shimmy up it.
In tenth grade, I decided to get over my fear of heights at the New York State Fair on their “Skycoaster,” which is basically a cross between bungee jumping and hanggliding. They put you in a harness, hook you up to a crane, and you get lifted 100 feet in the air (higher at Six Flags Darien Lakes and other locales, but those are usually over water… mine was over blacktop). You pull your own rip cord (which, fortunately, is really, really easy… because for the first forty feet of my plunge, I was too busy thinking “that was like tugging a loose shoelace; I wonder if it’s supposed to be that easy to puOOOOOOHMYGOOOOOOOOOOOD). You free-fall for about forty feet or so, and then the cable reaches its limit and you arc down towards the ground, moving forward like you’re Superman, and you arc back up over the heads of the crowd. You become a pendulum for a little while, never getting lower than ten feet, and never coming anywhere near the crane that hoisted you.
Six years later, I bungee jumped, but I had to ask the guy at the top to push me off the platform, because as fine as I felt consciously about it, my body wouldn’t allow me to let go of the handrails.
I still thought I was over my fear of heights. Until this weekend, when I came out of a parking garage by climbing two or three flights of stairs that were gratework, allowing me to see all the way to the bottom, and then stepped out onto another grate that was over nothing but a two-or-three-story concrete pit with giant fans embedded in the wall to pump out the car exhaust. I suddenly got intense vertigo and had to nearly dive for the grass (actually, I just stepped off and tried to look calm, but inside I was shaking pretty badly).
I don’t know if doing it once will prepare you for a second time. Or, if it does, it might only prepare you for a second time doing the exact same thing. I’m not sure.