TR: Basically I wanted you to tell me about the first time you went climbing and the equipment you used, and the window washing gear.
JB: I first started climbing with a friend of mine, about two years ago, we were at a restaurant on day, and he said, "do you want to go rock climbing?" and I had never done it before and it sounds like fun, and I ended up going with him and he had his father-in-law’s old window washing gear, a static rope, walk around to the top of the cliff, tie it off and walk back down. He had this old ascender type thing, it was huge, it was ancient, you would just climb up a little ways, and lock it off, climb a little more and lock it off.
TR: Which climb did you do?
JB: We did the one down at the Seismic wall.


Jason on Snot Girls
El Portrero, Mexico
TR: So the rope was fixed at the top and the bottom?
JB: No, it just had a loop on it and we attached it to the anchors.
TR: But how would you keep the rope from pulling up when you advanced the ascender.
JB: We would just lift it up.
TR: But you would have to take both hands off the climb?
AB: Yeah, it was pretty precarious.
JB: We didn’t even have climbing shoes.
TR: What kind of harness did you have?
JB: It was a big yellow industrial type harness that you had to buckle in the back so you couldn’t even put it on by yourself, you needed help.
TR: Did it have any padding?
JB: No, and we only had one, so one person would do the climb, undo the ascender at the top and then walk back around to the bottom again and swap off the harness.
AB: People would watch us climbing and told us, "you guys are idiots, what are you doing, you don’t even know what you are doing".
TR: How long did you climb using that method before you decided that you needed better equipment?
JB: Well we went to REI and decided that the stuff there was too expensive, so we went to an army surplus store and got a 200 ft. static rope, about 11mm thick, and then we eventually got a figure 8 so we could start rappelling down so we wouldn’t have to walk around anymore.
TR: So when you tied off to the chains did you run the rope through the chains and rap off normally, or did you only use one stretch of rope.
JB: We did a double figure 8 knot on one end of the rope and clip that to the chains, and then rap off one stretch of rope. That’s pretty much how we started out.
TR: Who finally showed you how to climb.
JB: We figured that we had the best way to climb until we were down on the new wall and wanted to climb Flintstones, but there was no was to walk around to the top to toprope it so there was some other climbers there who toproped it for us, and then we just climbed our static rope. After that, we got some quick draws and started practicing leading.
TR: On static rope?
JB: Yeah on static rope.
TR: Did you ever take a lead fall?
JB: No, I never really took a lead fall on the static rope, that worked out pretty good.
TR: So who was this other climber you started out with, was this Cass?
JB: No, it was this other guy, he is gone now.
TR: Dead, that kinda gone, dead in the ground?
AB: No, he moved away.
JB: After that I didn’t really have anyone to climbing with, so I got some equipment like everyone else, I ended up getting a harness at "play it again sports".
 TR: The one you have right now?
JB: Yeah.      Continued...