“How to find climbing partners?” I’ve never considered myself a shy person, but this question used to trouble me. Back in summer 2005, I signed up to a beginner’s rock climbing course at a local gym for me and my husband Jeremy, with the intention to turn him into my belay slave. It didn’t work out. He is not a climber. Since I hate to see when a male climber attempts to turn his girlfriend into a climber without her consent, I had to let my default belay slave go. As a result, assuming that nobody wanted to climb with a pure beginner, I didn’t start climbing more regularly in the gym until Dec 2005.

I had a few gym climbing partners then and things seemed to work out fine until I followed my first traditional route outside. That experience struck me; I immediately knew that it was the type of climbing I was looking for even though at that time I had no clue that this type of climbing is called traditional climbing. Again assuming that nobody wanted to climb with somebody who could only follow easy routes, I decided to take a formal course from NOLS in summer 2007.

During the course, I repeatedly asked each instructor how they found their climbing partners. I needed to know the right answer because the answer would dictate how much time I could spend climbing outdoors. They offered me some pointers: finding partners at the gym, at the crags, on the Internet…well it was not something I did not know. And I realized perhaps I didn’t ask the right question. It should be “who will climb with me?” and this seemed to be a bigger question. Among all the advice, I remembered one vividly “…it will only get easier.”

I had always had faith in that piece of advice, it will only get easier, but not until Spring 2008, did I verify that belief. Well, here is the story. Heather, my long time partner, and I spent two weeks climbing in Red Rocks in winter 2007-8. I met a climber called JP at a crag and found out that we both had April free; therefore we decided to meet at Joshua Tree. After I came back home, JP and I exchanged some emails but we never had an affirmative plan. I felt somewhat insecure however I still flew to Las Vegas for the Red Rock Rendezvous and planned to stay in the area for a few weeks. My thought was that there would be many people participating in the event, and chances were good that I could find a partner, and if nothing worked out I could always hunt JP down since in additional to his email address, I obtained his cell phone number as well.

After all, JP and I never got to climb together. He had too much fun in Joshua Tree and so did I in Red Rocks. I did not climb each single day when I was in Red Rocks, but I learned a precious experience from my accident and I climbed with many new friends whom I still climb with now. These newly-made friends also referred me to their climbing friends when I traveled to other climbing areas. Learning from the experience, I have also realized that people will climb with me and keep climbing with me even though I haven’t become the strong climber whom I still want to be. I became more comfortable finding partners to climb with on the Internet and so far most of my experiences have been very positive.

I believe that, to many people, “how to find climbing partners” is still a question not an action. I would like to share some ideas I have acquired over time on this topic to save some of your idle time. Finding climbing partners might be a tough task at first but it will only get easier.

1. Prepare yourself

Tons of people climb, and you will find your partners. You don’t have to be a 5.12 climber to find climbing partners, but there are a few things you need to prepare yourself with:

a. Be positive and pleasant

Climbing is fun, making new friends is fun, and the combination of the two is greater than the sum. Take it easy.

b. Be useful

There are a million ways to be a useful partner, and being able to lead harder routes is only one of them. Even if you don’t know how to lead, many people will still climb with you as long as you are a good follower, and they might thank you for giving them all the thrill to be tied to the sharp end.

Three basics to be a good follower:

1.Be a bomber belayer. Take pride in your belaying because the climber’s life is in your hand. The concept of belaying is very simple but, surprisingly, good belayers are not everywhere. If you are a safe belayer, you are a gem.

2.Know how to clean pros efficiently. Understand the basics of how active and passive pros work, reverse the path the pros are put in, be gentle and don’t drop anything.

3.Know how to manage ropes. Knowing how to flake and coil a rope is the minimum. When the leader is rigging her rack, you can start flaking the rope. At the end of the day, when the leader is sorting out her gear, it’s time for you to coil the rope neatly.

c. Be honest

Give yourself a honest assessment about what you can climb and what you cannot climb. It’s common for people to ask prospective climbing partners about their climbing ability. You should ask this question too. Being honest helps us to find a better match and keeps us safe. However, sometimes it’s hard to assess our climbing ability, and ratings are not usually consistent throughout the country. I found it useful to keep a climbing log which marks the info of the routes I have climbed. (For a sample climbing log, check my climblog). Not only does a climbing log keep you on top of your progress, but it gives others a better idea than “I can lead 5.8’s and follow 5.10’s.”

2. Intersect with prospective climbing partners

Once you are ready, the second step is to create opportunities to meet people. Here are some approaches I have done:

a. Release the message

Release the message that you are looking for a climbing partner. Plant the seed when you see fit. So let me tell you this: I am constantly looking for climbing partners. To know what I can climb, please refer to my climbing log.

b. Meet people at climbing areas

Post signs at the bulletin boards at camping area. For example, in Yosemite, there is Camp 4; in Red Rocks, there is the campground right outside of the 13-mile scenic loop. Post signs at local climbing gear shops, outfitters, and climbing gyms. Hang out at the area climbers usually go to. For example, when I was in Red Rocks, I met a few climbers at a nearby coffee shop by putting a guidebook on the table while I was surfing the Internet.

c. Meet people on the Internet

rockclimbing.com and mountainproject.com are two good places. Locally, there are cascadeclimbers.com, gunks.com etc.

3. Interact with climbing partners

You don’t work on a red-point project with a climbing partner you just picked up. Here is some advice.

a. Start out conservatively

Start out with something easier than your limit or something you have climbed before to test the water. You might have taken my advice to give your partner an honest assessment about yourself, but it doesn’t mean that he is also a loyal reader of littlepo.com. It’s your life and well-being we are talking about. Since the risk is hard to calculate with a new partner, reduce the consequences.

b. Pick up clues

Use the guidelines in “Prepare yourself” to assess whether this partner has prepared himself/herself. Is the rope neatly coiled when it is pulled out from his backpack? Does he check whether he has double backed, locked the biner etc before he tells you “you are on belay”? Does he pay attention to you when he belays you?

c. Communicate assertively

You and your partner are tied to the ends of the same rope, isn’t it worth the time to understand each other a little better? Communicate with your partner to get comfortable with each other’s climbing style and climbing ability. Double check with each other regarding climbing commands, dos and don’ts etc. Update your partner with your current physical and mental condition. If anything raises your concern, speak up. For example, he wants to climb or pushes you to climb things outside of your ability. You think the weather is coming in and bailing is a better option than pushing on.

Climbing is a serious activity; it is dangerous and you can get severely injured or die. Take good care of yourself and take good care of your new friend. Good communication can help you accomplish that. It’s admirable to step out of your comfort zone, but it’s foolish to attempt things beyond your limit.

I hope that these suggestions will help you to find your next climbing partner faster and more smoothly. I am always looking for people to climb with. I am most interested in moderate multi-pitch trad routes and backcountry alpine routes but I am also happy to climb anything, such as crag climbing or sport climbing. If you are interested in adding me to your partner pool, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Many climbers have told me that they are fascinated about this aspect of climbing: Climbing experience strikingly reflects real life, which makes them look at their lives more closely in different perspectives and grow due to this self-retrospection. I can relate to that. I have learned a great deal from being so intimate with the challenge, being face-to-face with my fear. After climbing, I often feel so alive; I get closer to my inner image. Climbing makes us pound on what we have experienced throughout our lives.

I find another direction applies as well. Many things I learned from an academic setting allow me to analyze rock climbing in a systematic way. Through comparative study, I digest things better and have the ability to integrate loose ends. I believe that all different schools of philosophy come from the same origin and point to the same destination. Therefore, I especially enjoy finding similarities between two disciplines, in a way to verify my hypothesis. For example, I found that traditional leading and maximum entropy (ME) machine learning (ML) have striking similarities. More interestingly, ME is my favorite ML model and trad leading is my favorite form of climbing.

Before I go into what the concept of an ME model is. I should talk briefly about the term “entropy.” I think the term “entropy” derives from physics; in computer science terminology we use entropy to measure information, and people can use them interchangeably. The higher the entropy is, the more information we have. The way to determine entropy depends on the probabilities of possible outcome of an event we are interested in. For example, say the event we are interested in is whether the sun will rise from the east. Since the sun always rise from the east, the possibility of sun rising from the east is one. We have zero entropy for this case. We have zero entropy for something absolutely certain; no more information to gain. However, if the event we are interested is the outcome of tossing a coin, then we have some entropy because at a fair toss, both heads and tails have 50% chance to appear.

Many things can affect the outcome of an event. How you are going to place your hands, your feet; how fatigued you currently are; whether you can find a good stance within the next few moves; how many climbing skills you have equipped etc. They all contribute to whether you are going to send a route or not. The outcome can also be described in a smaller scale: for example, whether you will pull through a roof or not.

A good model should be able to explain the past and predict the future. An ME model processes all the past events include all the known outcomes of an event and the values of corresponding parameters which affect the outcome. Taking existing constraints into consideration, this ME model therefore tells you the possibility of each single possible outcome of an event; and this set of possibilities maximizes the entropy, in other words, it maximizes the information we get.

The neat thing about an ME model is that it makes no presumptions. Everything it needs is collected objectively – constraints, past events, and values of parameters associated with past events. There is one somewhat subjective part here: you have to decide which parameters you think will affect the outcome. In rock climbing language, constraints can mean the rock type, the rock features which allow only certain moves etc; parameters can mean the place you are going to hold on, the way you are going to proceed the move, the distance to the next good stance etc.

Besides that it gives me the most freedom, another reason I love trad leading is that I have to think a whole lot. My mind has to constantly work when I am climbing. I think; therefore I am. I train my mind as an ME model – given different sets of possible sequence moving on rocks, I project the success rate, the fun level, and the risk. In order to get as accurate as possible predictions, I have to know very well what my body can do and what my body cannot do at every specific moment. We rock climbers are risk takers, but we take calculated risk, and this is the way I calculate my risk.

I worked three climbing courses this summer in Pacific Northwest for YBOYS. It’s self-explanatory that our students were all boys, and they were middle school or high school Seattle urban kids. Besides that, all my co-workers were guys, and therefore I was the only female on board.

YBOYS has ambitious goals and one of them is to encourage diversity. Our groups often consisted of boys from different backgrounds in terms of race, ethnicity, household income etc. I often joked that I was hired because I would add diversity to the program – I am a female, I am Asian, and I speak English as a second language. My responsibility should have been just hanging out there, posing in photos for fund-raising purposes. It turned out that it was only perhaps less than 1% of my duty. All my trips were technical, mentally challenging, and sometimes frustrating. However, I enjoyed them all because they were all super fun and rewarding; I gained precious experience, I made good friends with my co-instructors and I made some difference for the boys.

I can’t recall what my answer was when Andrew Jay, the program director of YBOYS, asked me about how I feel about possibly being the only female on board. That was the last interview question and I knew that he was more or less simply curious because at my previous job I worked with all-girl courses for seven months. That question made me start thinking; other than disguising myself better when taking a natural break, not being able to talk too openly about my period, what else? I hate stereotypes and I don’t like to overgeneralize, but I couldn’t help but wonder would there be significant difference between all-boy and all-girl groups and would I have to make adjustments interacting with boys?

The last time I asked myself similar questions was before I attended college. I chose computer engineering as my major so I knew that I would be one of the few girls in class. That was a big transition for me because I was from a single-gender high school. I finally decided that I would treat all boys the same way as I treated all my high school female friends. I was so outgoing and so enthusiastic to know everybody that in my junior year many of my good male friends confessed to me that my over-passionate style of breaking ice made them wonder whether I was hitting on them. I was puzzled, did it really take them two years to realize I just wanted to be friends?

The first course was a 6-day rock climbing camp at Tieton River Rocks, I felt that I was more like a caretaker than an outdoor educator. Those middle school kids had tons of energy and enjoyed provoking each other more than rock climbing. My co-instructor Ian Farquhar and I spent more time asking them not to throw rocks or stick fight than teaching them how to move on rocks. In the morning, we often spent much time resolving conflicts before we felt safe to take them to the crags. Ian commented that some of these kids projected a mom figure onto me despite that it was the last role I wanted to possess. His not-at-all persuasive argument was that if I had a kid when I was about their age, I would have a kid their age now. Toward the end, when I started to feel some connection with some kids and successfully convinced them to step out of their comfort zone, I suddenly did not mind anymore if they considered me as a mom. A short trip like this with such a young group, it was all about planting seeds.

The second course was a 14-day rock climbing camp at Squamish BC, Canada. Ian was again the course lead and we had a third volunteer instructor, Craig McKibben, who was awarded the position of President of the Washington Trails Alliance this year. This course, we had high school kids, and many of them were either alumni who understood the structure of a typical YBOYS trip or had intention to learn all about rock climbing. We therefore were able to execute our curriculum pretty well; many of them mock led on sport routes and were guided up a multi-pitch trad route.

Kids in general respected me as a climbing instructor; however, there were some awkward moments for me because kids made borderline comments toward me which could be interpreted as affection or flirting. Sometimes I was aware that they pushed too far and I asked them to keep the conversation appropriate; however the request was usually not effective because I was fairly friendly with them and they even told me that I should not discipline them with a big smile on my face. Sometimes I was not even aware that they might have pushed too far, due to cultural and language barriers. Ian’s explanation was that I should have been prepared for this; he said “they are high school kids and there is no girl around.” I respect Ian as a professional outdoor educator and climbing instructor but in terms of the dynamics between me and the boys, I took his words only for reference.

The third course was a 14-day mountaineering expedition in Alpine Lake Wilderness area. Salz was the course lead. The terrain was less technical than the previous two rock climbing camps, we never traveled on fifth class terrain, but the trip was in fact more intense and physically demanding. We had many long days, much off-trail travel and bushwhacking in the area was demanding. When we attempted peak ascents, the approach was usually a combination of snow travel, hopping over boulder fields, walking on screes, and traversing exposed slabs. It was not technical but the consequences were high. Kids were scared when they did fixed line travel and when we belayed them or lowered them down. We were most afraid when kids were on less technical terrain and they felt relatively safe and felt okay to mess around.

I became more authoritative during this course. There was just no time to engage in a conversation with a kid while descending a steep rock pile. I wanted them to follow specific instructions promptly because I didn’t want them to get hurt; if I happened to hurt somebody’s feelings, so be it. We could deal with that after we made it back to camp. Salz and I understand that nobody likes to be commanded all the time, and teenagers are even more rebellious. We explained to them the circumstances and most of the kids understood it and took it just fine. However, there was this one kid who had strong resistance toward authoritative figures, and he reacted to Salz and I differently. He would argue with Salz but after Salz reiterated himself, he would suck it up and complain about it covertly. With me, he would try to engage endless arguments, defending himself, and then propagate his complaints overtly among other boys. Because the requests from Salz and I were pretty much the same and the method we used to deliver them was similar, I sometimes wondered whether I got the special treatment because I was not a guy.

Some parents were surprised when they learned that their kids would be with a female instructor, but the reactions were always positive; it seemed that they were happy to see a co-ed instructor team. A father said that I was brave to spend two weeks mountaineering with boys. A female social worker was excited to see me work with YBOYS and a couple moms said “I have to meet you” and shook my hands passionately when they picked up their sons after we returned from the backcountry. I was flattered and encouraged and at the same time I felt a little bit bad because my co-instructors worked just as hard or harder than I and they didn’t get the same kind of recognition.

Even though I have reported some observations from working with boys this summer, I still haven’t had a definite conclusion or genius discovery to share about the differences between working with boys and girls. Instead, I have realized that there are more similarities than differences when working with boys or girls. The decision I made years ago before I entered the man-dominated engineering world is still in style. I love to address people’s needs in a more generic sense; as for non-biological driven differences between males and females, I’d like to deal with them on a person-to-person basis. It is just more fun for me to not make assumptions, not think about stereotypes and to interact with people on a more personal level. Especially in a professional setting I would rather others treat me as a human being rather than a female. In order to accomplish this I should take the initiative to treat others as human beings as well.