Top ten reasons to rock climb with girls:

1. Some of us have nice thin (but strong!) forearms, itty bitty wrists and long fingers; perfect for cleaning stuck nuts and walked cams. I rescued a blue Camalot on a route at Tuolumne that wouldn’t have been retrievable by any of my guy partners without some extremely creative antics and additional hardware.

2. You’ll be the envy of the other guys at the crag. You’ll be the extra-super-envy of the other guys at the crag if your female climbing partners are traditional leaders.

3. If you’re climbing with girls, you’re more likely to have other girls approach your party and chat folks up, because hey — you’re presumptively non-creepy enough for some girl to rock climb with you. And the corollary applies: you’ll spend a lot less time lost, because we don’t hesitate to stop and ask other climbers (or gas station attendants, or grocery store clerks) for directions and/or routefinding tips.

4. Food and drink. Subject to exceptions, there are usually yummy leftovers when you eat with girls. You also get to sample tasty treats like Luna Bars and that awesome vanilla cinnamon oatmeal without having the cute girl at the grocery store checkout raise her eyebrow at you for buying food with the words “for women” on the label.

5. Our overnight kits generally include such important but often overlooked items as Aleve, eye drops, fingernail clippers and chap stick with SPF.

6. When getting to know new partners, we tend to understate and/or underestimate our relative skill… which tends to lead to pleasant surprises on get-to-know-you routes instead of the epics that can occur when a new partner overstates their skill.

7. Come on, admit it… sometimes you actually like the “Lilith Fair crap” we listen to on road trips. As much as you try to hide it, we can hear you singing along.

8. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a girl climbing partner with whom traded backrubs after a long day of climbing qualifies as sports massage and not flirting. True story. It can happen.

9. No matter how long we go without a shower, we always smell better than boys for the long drive home.

10. I’ll spare you the “climb like a girl” coaching because despite the fact that I just wrote a partly tongue-in-cheek guest post full of gender-based generalizations, the generalizations that climbers make about boys being strong, powerful and dynamic and girls being graceful, technical and static don’t sit well with me. But, to make a long story short, just like we can learn a thing or two from you… you can learn a thing or two from us.

What have I missed? Share your thoughts in the comments, or pop over to rockclimbergirl.com for more on my climbergirl life.

All Climbing thanks Sara Lingafelter for today’s guest post. You can read more from Sara at her blog RockClimberGirl.com. You can also find Sara on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/theclimbergirl sharing her thoughts.

The post Top ten reasons to rock climb with girls first appeared on All Climbing.