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>Imagine five football fields, placed end to end. Then imagine that distance vertically – all 1,500 feet of it. Rather than soft, green grass, your “field” is a jagged rock face with the Gunnison River rushing below, and it’s not gravity that’s bonding you to terra firma, but static ropes and the hand of God.

Next week, Mary Pat Jones ’09 will experience this scenario firsthand as she and a small group of accomplished climbers descend into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison near Estes Park, Colo. For the economics and German major from Dunwoody, Ga., the chance to rappel from a cliff taller than the Empire State Building is not an acrophobe’s nightmare, but the chance of a lifetime.

Jones prepares to rappel off West Virginia's New River Bridge.
“There’s a lot of exposure,” Jones said one afternoon from the lobby of Williams Gymnasium, her long, blond hair wet from a swimming class. “You’re literally hanging hundreds – in this case, a thousand feet – in the air. The view is spectacular. You can see everything.”

Jones and her team, made up of other Georgia climbers, will rappel into the canyon using static ropes and specially designed harnesses. The descent will take about 15 or 20 minutes, during which Jones said she will be “free hanging” and not touching the canyon wall.

Once safely at the bottom, she and the other climbers will rope climb back to the top. Although there is a way to walk out of the canyon, Jones finds the direct route “more exciting.”

“The way the cliff goes, it starts out kind of overhanging more and we rig the rope up [there],” she said. “The rock face actually goes back out, away from the gorge, so we’re literally hanging out in the middle of the air. … The only time we’ll be touching the wall is when we’re clipping onto the rope and when we’re getting off back at the top.”

As one would imagine, hanging from a rope 150 stories above a canyon floor is a risky proposition. “Stupidity is probably the biggest danger,” Jones said, adding bad weather and rock falls are also worries. “A rock fall is a huge concern with most climbing things.”

Despite the similarities – rocks, ropes and potential for danger – Jones is quick to point out that she’s not a “rock climber.” Her sport, called “vertical caving,” differs significantly from the rock climbing pictured on inspirational posters and the glossy pages of outdoor magazines.

In vertical caving, she explained, ropes are designed to stretch as little as possible and specially designed “climbing systems” enable climbers to “descend into, and climb out of, places that could otherwise not be accessed by man without use of damaging, relatively dangerous equipment such as winches, cable ladders, and other interesting configurations.”

It’s a relatively new sport, started in the 1950s by the “Father of Vertical Caving,” Bill Cuddington. “It was basically created so that people could descend into pits in the ground without damaging the walls,” Jones said. “Caves are amazingly delicate, so rock climbing on cave walls would be devastating.”

Jones started vertical caving at age 13 with her father, who will accompany her on the Black Canyon expedition. “I had been horizontal caving all my life, but I had never been on a rope,” she said. “I had watched my dad practice [single rope technique] and wanted to try it for myself.”

Since that time, Jones has made a name for herself. She has two world records for speed climbing, and although the sport has no “official governing body,” she is thought to be the youngest person to tackle the Black Canyon, West Virginia’s New River Bridge (876 feet) and Mexico’s Sotano de las Golondrinas (1,100 feet).

All of the excitement and perilous possibilities aside, what Jones finds most frightening about her trip to the Black Canyon is the prospect of making up a week’s worth of class work. “This whole trip, the thing that scares me the most is making up the schoolwork,” she said. “I’m not afraid of the climb at all!”