Outdoor Rock Climbing at Ralph Stover State Park

Welcome to Travel Tuesday! I’m taking a short break from my Scotland posts to bring you a hike/adventure I went on at the end of March — outdoor rock climbing in Ralph Stover State Park in Pennsylvania! :]!!

A couple months ago, I decided to take up rock climbing and joined the recreational climbing team at Rutgers–thus far, it’s been a lot of fun and I’m really glad I got into it! Our team is super helpful and welcoming, and our captain tries to make our workouts fairly intense (e.g. >100 pushups + 10 minutes worth of planks along with a bunch of bodyweight strength training/core exercises), which I appreciate (and sometimes simultaneously hate), but our tagline could pretty much be, “We’re going to do (insert intense workout here)…or not. It’s rec team.”

Somewhere in early March, I found out that there was going to be a trip to do some outdoor rock climbing with the Rutgers Recreation GO Outdoors group, so I decided to coerce my friend to sign up with me! We met up at “base camp” on the Cook/Douglass campus and the group transported us over to Ralph Stover State Park via two vans! (The last time I did an outdoor trip with any college group was 8 years ago when I did a Redwoods Camping trip up in super-northern California!)

Outdoor Rock Climbing at Ralph Stover State Park

After we got to the parking lot, we each got helmets and harnesses (unless you had your own) and went for a short hike into the park to get to where we’d be climbing. I was slightly worried that I’d suddenly develop a fear of heights and not be able to do much of anything, especially after seeing this:

We were also somewhat concerned about terrible weather since there were potential threats of snow but thankfully, it turned out to be a gorgeous day! (We lucked out, because the weather wasn’t all that wonderful during the days leading up to and the days after the day we went!)

They set up 3 different areas for us to climb–the leftmost was the easiest, followed by the rightmost one, and the middle one was the most difficult. (I managed to make it to the top of all of them! :]!)

After we’d had our fill of climbing the “easier” ones and had eaten our lunches, about half of us decided to trek on over to a different location for some harder climbs. I have no idea how far we walked, but I was reallyyy glad I changed out of my climbing shoes and back into my hiking boots for it, or my feet would’ve absolutely hated me.

We also saw some wildlife along the way!

There were several other climbers at the next site we chose, but we’d claimed one of them beforehand so we set up shop and took turns climbing!

This was way higher than any climb I’d ever done, and a lot of it looked almost completely flat, so I was pretty pleasantly surprised that I even made it as far as I did (~10-15 feet from the top :'( I tried so hard!). I was completely exhausted to the point where everything was shaking, so I unfortunately didn’t make it to the top, but it’ll be another fun challenge for me to work on!

I’m unfortunately not sure which routes we were on, but the one next to us had “God or Girl” spray-painted onto the rock in yellow! You can actually search the different climbing routes by difficulty via the Mountain Project! :]

Spring semester has ended for the Rutgers students, which unfortunately also means that my usual gym and the rock wall have also closed for the summer. I’m planning on checking out the nearby indoor climbing gyms though, so I may write about those in the future! :]

• Are you afraid of heights?
• Have you ever been rock climbing? Indoor or outdoor?
• For videos of me climbing, go check out my instagram!