Defying Gravity – Butler Style!

A PE class is a requirement for any degree at Butler, but who really wants to take run-of-the-mill weights and training or boring bowling? Certainly not us! Hannah, Kallie, Sarah, Jennie, Morgan and I decided to branch out and take Rock Climbing to satisfy this requirement. Here’s how it’s been going so far!

Of course we had to learn safety before they allowed us to do any climbing. Crazy I know! It’s not like falling off of a 50-foot tower could cause some type of injury! Ok just kidding. The technique used to assist a climber up the wall (or in real life, up an actual cliff) is called Belaying.

Me belaying a climber while Hannah works as my trusty anchor for backup.

Heres Sarah tying herself into the safety rope so she can climb the playpen.

Heres Kallie tying the other end of the rope to herself to belay a climber.

Once we are sure that we have a solid backup there are three different walls to climb: the easy wall, the hard wall, and the playpen. As you might have guessed, the easy wall is the easiest to make it to the top, and the hard wall has small rocks, big gaps, and takes quite a bit of effort to fully climb.

Sarah tackling the hard wall while Jennie works as her belayer.

Now the Playpen isn’t so much a regular rock wall, but more a bunch of random stuff strung together with some heavy-duty cable and hung from the tower. You think I’m kidding? Just check out these pictures:

Occasionally (ok, more like all the time now) we do actually make it to the top of the tower.

Usually to get down we simply rappel down the back of the tower, but at our last class period our instructor introduced us to….Drum Roll Please!…..the Zip Line!

Of course the class can’t stay the same for the entire 8-week period, so we are slowly introduced to different challenges. So far our only challenge has been the milk crates. This literally involves stacking milk crates on top of each other while climbing up them.

So truthfully we may be biased – but does this not look like the greatest PE class ever?!?

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