Belaying as if my guide’s life depended on it…

We went rock climbing again on Tuesday! During our walk to the climbing wall, the main guide called me up to him and we had a nice conversation about where we were from, how long we had been climbing, and some other things. He asked me if I had ever belayed before, and I said yes, but it was more than half a year ago, so I hardly remembered how to do it. (The belayer is the person on the ground holding the rope and keeping the climber from falling.) He told me that he would teach me how to do it and let me belay him up the mountain. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if he was seriously going to climb up the mountain and let me belay him, but sure enough, he taught me how to do it and then started climbing! Those minutes were by far the most stressful of the day, but he made it up and down without me pulling him off the wall or doing anything else unhelpful. Even now I can’t believe that he trusted me enough from our brief talk to let me belay him. I call that experience “Immersion Belaying”. Throughout the rest of the day, he seemed to take extra interest in teaching me different ways to climb, and at the end showed me how to do the hardest part of a climb that no one that day had tried yet. There was a big stalactite jutting out and coming down from the side of the mountain that was about seven feet off the ground. Everyone else (including me, the first time) used a bamboo ladder to climb around it, but I really wanted to try climbing it from the ground. It was really hard, because much of it was like doing one armed pullups, but I ended up doing it! It felt very relieving to have completed it without falling. Over the course of our first two climbing sessions, I climbed up 12 routes! I felt pretty proud of that.