Taking her life in her hands, Cate Foster hits the wall with the climbers of the New Zealand Alpine Club.
"You're never too old," John Salisbury tells me on the grey morning we meet at the Auckland Grammar School Rock Wall. He should know, as fit as a cricket although a few summers over 60 and with decades of climbing behind him, he's certainly someone to aspire to for a beginner such as me. "All you need is a bit of faith that you can do it, and it's astonishing what your body can achieve."
The chairman of the Auckland section of the New Zealand Alpine Club, Magnus Hammarsal, agrees, and points out that as a woman I have some advantages, even in such a physically demanding sport as climbing up nearly vertical rock walls for no other reason but for the challenge of it. "Women don't have the upper body strength men do, and so they very quickly learn better technique than men who can rely a bit more on brute strength. They work out how to get around a problem rather than going headlong at it."
To illustrate what he means, Magnus gets fellow club member and keen climber Chie Noda to harness up and demonstrate. Chie has been climbing for several years and so has all the correct shoes, mandatory helmet and a whole lot of other stuff, but it is her limber strength that instantly strikes my eye. Magnus and John have already run a belay line to fixed points in the top of the wall and Chie's safety harness is attached to this. She and Magnus double-check each other's knots, buckles and helmets, as this is correct protocol in these safety conscious years. So is the requirement for all users to pre-register their presence on the NZAC (Auckland Section) website (see below for details) as Auckland Grammar, in whose grounds these historic quarry walls lie, is rightly anxious to ensure no accidents happen.
But Chie is correctly harnessed, double clipped to the belay line, and on a medium difficulty stretch of the wall, with John acting as the belayer on the rope behind her, quickly climbs to about two metres off the ground. I can instantly see how important the job of the belayer is. Doing exactly the same job as the automated systems in place on the indoor climbing walls one finds all over the city (fully automated for beginners only), a moment's inattention could result in someone falling and possibly being seriously injured. I can see that John doesn't let his concentration waver for a moment.
