Climbing

Today I had a conversation with one of my office mates, and he was suprised by my description of what the attraction and motivation is for climbing. It was a little strange, because it reminded me of how wrong my understanding of climbing was before I actually started doing it; so here are some misconceptions and clarifications about the sport (is it a sport?):

1)"Rock climbing" is not "Mountaineering"
Mountaineering sometimes involves rock climbing, but they are not the same thing.

2)The goal in rock climbing is very rarely to get to the top; it is the way in which you get to the top which is interesting. For many people, the beauty and difficulty of the movements are the focus. Which is to say, given a choice, we do not always (rarely, actually) take the easiest route to the top.

3)Climbing can be very competitive. When I used to see climbers with their "go climb a rock" t-shirts in Berkeley, they always looked like dirtbags. This, in combination with the fact that the ones that didnt look like dirtbags looked like hippies made me think that it was more about getting out into nature than anything else. However, the fact that the difficulty of the routes are rated numerically naturally leads to competitiveness with yourself and others.

4)Climbing is generally quite safe. Most accidents in rock climbing are caused by user error rather than by equipment failure. Mountaineering is much less safe because of the "objective dangers", which are things like storms rolling in, rocks falling, avalanches, lightening etc:
things that are out of your control.

thats all i can think of for now