My advice to anyone who takes a rock-climbing class -- trust your shoes. Special rock-climbing shoes, which are like slippers with a rubber sole and are uncomfortably tight, can adhere to any gap. crack or nub found on a rocky face. Trust me. When you are roughly 50 feet up and are at about an 80-degree angle, and both hands are pinching tiny granite bumps for support, you must have faith in the shoes, since all that's keeping you up are your big toes purchased upon a couple of rocky protruberances that feel as firm as a three-foot ledge (and that is what you tell yourself as you cling precariously).

My son and I took a day-long course from REI, scaling rocks in the McDowell Mountains in far north Scottsdale. After about an hour of learning techniques and scaling a boulder, we were ready to challenge Headsmacker (or Headclobber or Headwhacker -- it was aptly named as we would discover later), a climb to the top of a granite slab.

The first part was easy, a scramble up a short boulder to an overhang (where, yes, you inevitably would smack your head). Then the tricky part: Hoisting your leg over to wedge your left foot into a crack, then twisting your body while swinging your right leg as your left hand sought a grip, any grip, at the top of the crack where it slimmed to a very narrow crevice. One the left hand was set, attention was focused to the right foot which needed to find, well, anything.

This is where the rubber really came through. (A note on the shoes -- worn without socks, they were like a second skin and damned uncomfortable, squeezing your toes into the kind of point that only the high-heel warriors of the fashion runways could endure for more than 10 minutes.) On my first of two climbs, my right foot scraped rock as I removed my left foot from the crack, thus slipping about four inches before coming to a stop about a half-foot from the drop-off created by the overhang. Yes, I was tied in and belayed by Megan, climbing professional, but still ...

Had I stopped there, where the slab was "thin" as Megan had warned earlier (that meant very few available holds, and I really wish she had not told us that), I would have frozen. Megan and colleague Jason shared many wonderful stories later about climber who refused to budge, becoming so scared that they had to be physically removed from the rock, fingernail scraping as they were lifted. But even when petrified, bad things can happen. As Jason said, "I've seen something come out of every orifice. Yes, even that."

So I focused on the next handhold, scanning the granite for anything and, as I stepped up, put full trust in the shoes to stick to any protrubance no matter how slight (and all were slight, save for a three-inch-long bump about halfway up that was the perfect resting point -- at the time it seemed so generous you could do jumping jacks on it).

Once past the thin area, it was relatively easy with enough bumps and indentations to successfully maneuver to the top (you can see what I saw in the photo looking down at the people looking up).

As happy as I was to make the climb twice, Bryson would ascend four times, the last two taking more difficult routes (rather than using the tilted boulder as a starting point, one climb started on a steeper, smoother rock face, while his last involved a difficult climb up a narrow crack, leading to an overhang that required precise hand and leg movements -- it was impressive).

I would recommend rock-climbing to anyone. Just make sure you have the right shoes.