Hiking Slang
Feel free to add to the list.
- Anchor: Affix a rope to the rock via a bolt or webbing
- Autoblock: Another name for a Prusik Loop. Used for slowing descent of a rope or ascending a rope.
- Beer: Hiking, Canyoneering, etc. recovery beverage
- Belay Device: ATC, Figure eight, Totem or any other device used for slowing your descent on a rope while rappelling
- Biner: Short for carabiner. A carabiner locking or non-locking metal loop used for rope work.
- Bomb-Proof: illusion that anchor, pack etc. is indestructible
- Bushwhacking: Travelling through forest or woods with no established trails or markings
- Cairn: The stone piles often erected along a trail to serve as an indicator of trail direction.
- Canyoneering: Sport of hiking, rock hopping and swimming through a dry to flooded canyon.
- Deadmans Anchor: anchor that consists of webbing tied around a rock, which is buried under a pile of rocks.
- Downclimbing: Descending the difficult way.
- Face Plant: Trip and falling on your face
- Hoodoo: The rock formations that look like a pillar, Such as in Bryce, Utah
- Hot Spot: a pre-blister area on the foot usually red and slightly swollen.
- Male Blindness: when a male hiker watches a beautiful female walking over rough terrain and stares intensely at all the jiggling parts, making him too dizzy to see straight when it’s his turn to walk the same terrain!
- Nature Boner: When you go out in nature and the surrounds are so breath-taking they excite you.
- Naturetarded: When you get done hiking, canyoneering, rappelling, etc. and you are so hyper you can’t think straight or calm down
- Rock! Warning called out to let person below you on a hill know that a rack is coming their way
- Scrambling: Easy mountain climbing, usually unroped.
- Shiggy: Off-trail terrain, typically consisting of brush, brambles, mud, and stream crossings.
- Shin Dagger: small agave plants that grow under tall grass.
- Snake Fright: The involuntary noise made when you almost step on a rattlesnake
- Technical Canyoneering: Similar to canyoneering, but requires skills and gear in rappelling, anchor building and canyon navigation.
