Sport Climbing Conversion
The aim of this course is to provide a comprehensive introduction to climbing “Sport” routes in the outdoors, tailored specifically to Melbourne’s rapidly growing indoor climbing community.
Take your first steps outside
What is Sport Climbing?
Sport climbing means that there are permanent bolts/hardware in the rock, which has the advantage that a minimum of gear is required to safely climb on them (you don’t need to buy as much gear to start climbing in the outdoors, yay!).
Since the fixed hardware is specially designed for this purpose, the techniques to learn are much simpler than traditional – “trad” – climbing, and can be comprehensively covered in just one day.
Aims of this course
The goal of the session is to first introduce environmental concerns when climbing in the outdoors and how to mitigate these. Every participant will then climb two outdoor sport climbs, each practicing a different skill set (practiced at ground level before leading up). The climbs, in order, are:
- thread-and-lower – passing the rope through the fixed hardware and being lowered to the ground
- thread-and-abseil – starting the same as the first exercise, but the goal is to abseil down using an ATC+prusik combo instead.
- (if time allows) safely bailing from a sport route, without leaving a leaver-biner behind – and when it is appropriate to do this.
Finally, if time allows, participants will learn some additional skills, including belaying from the top of a route (and safely lowering a partner), how to how to prusik up a rope, e.g. to regain a roof after falling off, and how to clip a bolt that is out of reach.
Just finished the level 2 alpine course. Again, excellent instruction and knowledge concerning glacier travel, long toping, short-roping,, and crevasse rescue. Thanks Hamid and Lachlan
Hamid was our instructor for both courses and he had an incredible in his teaching style – the right amount of information and theory mixed in with practical application and loads of fun. I had no knowledge about how to climb in Alpine environments prior to these courses. These courses have provided me with essential skills and knowledge to feel more confident going to Mera Peak.
A big thank you to Hamid and The Climbing Company for offering such a great course so close to Melbourne! Would highly recommend.
