The aim of the study was to examine differences in personality traits and sensation seeking factors among rock climbers and non-athletes. As a measure of personality, we used the IPIP50 personality questionnaire (Mlačić and Goldberg, 2007), validated, with satisfactory metric characteristics on the Croatian sample. The Sensation Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, 1979) was used as a measure of sensation seeking. The convenient sample used for this study consisted of two groups of participants between the ages of 20 and 39; 231 rock climbers (118 men and 113 women) and 211 non-athletes (81 men and 130 women). The average age of the rock climbers was 29.6 years (SD=5.16) and of the non-athletes 27.3 years (SD=5.12). The study found gender differences, where women scored more on agreeableness, intellect and experience seeking, and men on emotional stability. Regarding the male sample, we found significant positive correlations between extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability and thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition, and sensation seeking total score. The t-test analysis found that rock climbers are more emotionally stable and conscientious (for both genders) and more comfortable and intellectual (only among men) than non-athletes. Mann-Whitney U test revealed that in comparison to non-athletes, rock climbers of both genders achieve significantly higher scores on thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition, and the general sensation seeking factor than non-athletes. The results obtained in this study contribute to a better understanding of the specific characteristics of rock climbers, which is especially important to consider while working with athletes.