Love on the Rocks

For Dana and Doug Englekirk, life is one happy uphill climb

David Moriah

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While the majority of couples feel most comfortable (and safe!) on horizontal terra firma, Doug and Dana Englekirk move quite smoothly in the vertical world.

Last year, the American Sport Climbing Federation rated Doug number-one in the rugged sport of rock climbing, which involves scaling sheer rock walls-with only minute bumps and ledges to hold onto-then leaning backward as the wall angles and finally reaching the top by climbing over huge overhanging boulders. You could call Doug the Michael Jordan of sport climbing.

"Sport climbing emphasizes the difficulty of staying on the rock without falling off," Doug explains. "So the walls or routes we climb are 80 to 100 feet at the tallest." He makes it sound easy, but the walls he's talking about are steep vertical climbs, with "holds" often less than an inch wide-and spaced far apart. It takes an outrageous level of fitness and coordination to climb such a wall without falling. Doug admits, "All your physical strength and endurance are pushed to the limit."

Since Dana is also a veteran rock climber, you'd think it was Doug's Spiderman achievements that first attracted her to him. But her initial interest had little to do with his ranking as a top climber. In fact, Dana says experience showed her that sport climbers "usually just want to talk about how great they are."

So two years ago she was surprised when she read an article about Doug in Climbing magazine. "His Christian character came through so clearly in the article," she remembers. "He was the exact opposite of the cocky climbers I'd known. He claimed God had allowed him the successes he'd had."

Dana was impressed with Doug's humility, but also with an unexplainable conviction that he was the man for her. She wanted to let Doug know someone was praying for him, so she found out where he attended church and went there for a Sunday service. Doug was out of town and missed church that day, but Dana met one of his friends, who passed her phone number along to Doug.

A week later, Doug invited Dana to go climbing, and they took along Dana's son, Nate, from a previous marriage. At age five, Nate was already a climber. Dana had been an instructor of troubled adolescents when he was a toddler. "I'd make Nate little harnesses and put him on the wall," Dana remembers. "It would totally inspire the delinquent-type students who thought they were too tough to try something new. If a two-and-a-half-year-old could do it, so could they!"

Nate liked Doug right away-especially his truck. "Ever since Nate could talk," Dana recalls, "he'd been praying for 'a king cab, blue, 4x4.' Then Doug drove up to our house in a blue, 4-wheel-drive pickup-with a king cab.

"But the first thing I noticed about Doug was that he listened to Nate," Dana goes on. "He seemed so ready to love Nate, and that was a real blessing to me. As we started seeing each other a lot, Doug would take Nate to McDonalds for an ice cream. Or Nate would say, 'I want to climb in your gym,' and Doug would make time to climb with him."

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1996, Fall

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