Lead Climbing

Once you've become a skilled top-rope climber, your next step is lead climbing. When lead climbing, you’ll tie into one end of the rope and clip it into a series of quickdraws that are already attached to bolts on the gym’s wall. Again, you’ll have a belayer. 

Lead climbing indoors is very much like sport climbing outside, except that indoors the quickdraws are already in place.

The challenge with lead climbing is that if you slip or miss the next quickdraw, you’ll fall a short distance back to the previous clipped–in point. That’s a farther, harder fall than you’d have when top-roping.