Learning to climb

Learning to climb is very much like learning to ride a bike or ski down a snowy slope. You'll never forget the basic moves, but will need years of practise to perfect them.
Climbing styles come in many flavors. The basic games include: bouldering, indoor climbing, free rock climbing, trad rock climbing, solo climbing aid climbing, ice climbing and alpine climbing.
Bouldering addicts climb short jumbles of rock, often only a couple of feet high. The key here is linking the moves: because of their short height bouldering problems tend to be fairly intense and technical. It's hundreds of feet of difficulty compressed into 5-10 moves. Unless you're climbing so-called highball problems you'll climb unroped and close enought to the ground to be safe to jump off from. During the nineties there's been a renewal of interest for this game. Thousands of bouldering areas have cropped up worldwide.
During the late eighties and early nineties climbing on plastic, aka indoor climbing became of fashion. Most competitions are on plastic nowadays. Indoor gyms are excellent places to learn rope handling techniques and to work on the basic moves. However, most of the diehard climbers agree that there's nothing like natural rock.
Free Climbing is the art of climbing a rock without using your equipment for upward motion. You can only use your arms, hands and other essential body parts to climb. The gear is used for protection only. This is where ethics come into play. A climb is said to be onsighted when a climber leads the climb for the first time without having watched other climbers do it and reaching the end without falling or pulling on gear. If you don't meet these criteria, you have to start over from the ground up to complete the climb.