Oh, yay! Thank you for writing this up! And I'm delighted that you had such a good time.

I almost immediately discovered that I am one of those people whose instinct is to pull themselves up with their arms.

You and almost everybody else *g*. It's a natural tendency, if you feel you're about to fall off. The key thing is to learn to hang off straight arms whenever possible.

It's one of the many climbing things that feels completely counter-intuitive at first; then it clicks and you can feel that your arms are working much less that way.