A Thousand Ways Up

    The first thing I noticed when I walked into the climbing area was that it did not really look like a gym wall. It looked as if somebody had taken a piece of a mountain and set it down inside a college recreation center. The wall slopes and sticks out in different places, with hundreds of colorful holds scattered across the rough gray surface. A rainbow of holds took over every open space, accompanied by smears of white chalk. Little strips of duct tape guide climbers from one hold to the next. There are numbers everywhere too, marking the routes from as low as 30 all the way to the high 900's. Thin black mats covered the entire floor, along with larger black and red crash pads pushed together, to create a giant mattress that engulfs the floor. Before someone begins to climb, the pads must be dragged and shoved into place. Once they are under you, they completely disappear from your attention. You look up at the wall. From down below, it looks like a colorful mess. From above, they all coalesce into individual pieces of a puzzle.

Me Climbing the Overhang Section

    There is a whole routine to climbing that isn't obvious just by looking at the wall. After you sign into the rec with your student ID, you walk up to the table in front of the area, sign your name, and walk in. You need to get climbing shoes. This is the strangest part to someone who has never climbed before. They are tight enough that your toes get pushed toward the front of the shoe, which is uncomfortable when you're just walking around. When you are on the actual wall, the shape makes sense instantaneously. The pointed front permits you to balance on tiny footholds that would be otherwise impossible in traditional sneakers. Then there is the chalk. Rubbing it into your hands leaves a dry, almost dusty feeling between your fingers and in the creases of your palms. It gets onto everything. Your hands will turn white, then the chalk transfers onto the holds, into your clothes, your hair, and eventually onto literally everything you touch. After doing a few climbs, the whole area has that dusty, used feeling that makes it obvious that people spend a lot of time ascending these walls. You hear background conversation, shoes scraping against the artificial rocks, and the occasional thump as someone crashes down onto the mats. The student workers play popular music on a small speaker above the closet containing shoes of every reasonable size. The song "Sweater Weather" by The Neighborhood was playing during one of my first climbs.

    The wall has its own language when it comes to difficulty. The routes are rated on a scale that runs from 0 to 1000, with 0 being extremely easy and 1000 being practically impossible for the average person. The numbers are loosely connected to the V-scale that climbers use, so a route around 100 is somewhere around a V1-level climb. For readers unfamiliar with climbing grades, this short video provides a quick explanation of how the V-scale works. V-scale Explained. The higher numbers mean the moves become more demanding, whether that's due to smaller holds, longer reaches, awkward positions, steeper sections, or some amalgamation of all of these issues. The exact combination is up to the setter's discretion. Gavin explained that difficulty isn't just about how small a hold is. "A route can have big holds but still be hard because of the movement," he elaborated, "Sometimes the holds aren't even that bad, but they're placed in a way that you have to stretch or shift your weight in a weird way." This changed the way I looked at the wall. I had originally thought climbing was primarily about being strong enough to pull yourself upward, but watching someone experienced stop halfway up a route and just stare at the wall for some time makes it obvious that there is much more going on. Climbers are constantly planning their next move, figuring out where their feet need to go in order to position their body so the next reach is possible. What looked like a messy assortment of colors was actually a puzzle, with a solution carefully thought out before the route was even created.

Gavin Closing the Wall

    Gavin is one of the people who knows the wall from a completely different perspective because he is a setter. He adjusted his circular glasses as he looked over at the wall, his blonde middle part falling neatly around them. His short beard and mustache gave him a more put together look, while the green Into the Wild Life shirt he wore had already picked up some chalk from the wall.  His arms had a lean, defined look to them that was unsurprising once you learned he spent a lot of time climbing. He works at the wall, so he is there often. He is especially interested in setting the routes for others to climb. To him, setting means deciding where holds go and creating a sequence of movements that someone else will have to solve. He explained that as he is climbing to set the route, he tries to imagine what nonconventional ways other climbers might try to go about figuring out his course. He can have the most unique climb imaginable, but that means nothing if someone tall can just reach over all the moves. These paths are not permanent either. The workers constantly put up and remove climbs. Gavin told me that once a semester there is a larger reset for Climbfest, a climbing competition held at the gym. That means routes people spend months learning can (and will) eventually disappear, replaced by an entirely different set of problems. This makes the wall feel like a living conundrum, repeatedly wiped clean and rebirthed into something new.

    My favorite part about talking to Gavin was that despite how seriously he takes climbing and setting, he does not take himself too seriously. At one point he looked at me and jested, "Ayden is the worst climber in the history of Bloomsburg." It was obviously a joke, especially because he was still encouraging me while I was climbing, but it captured something important about the atmosphere of the room. There is competition between the climbers on any given day, but it never feels even a little hostile. People can make fun of each other, struggle on the same climb for 20 minutes, fall onto the pads over and over again, but they always get right back up and try again. Gavin, despite making jokes about
my climbing skill, never failed to provide assistance and advice during my climbs. That combination of skill and laid-back humor makes the climbing area feel less intimidating than the towering wall itself initially looks. George, who was climbing with me, had a similar experience. After putting on the shoes, he laughed about how tight they were. The moment he got up on the wall and stepped onto a miniscule foothold, he looked down at Gavin and I and sardonically claimed "You can really stand on the tiny foot spots with just the front of your shoe!" Whenever he got stuck he followed Gavin's lead of stopping to analyze the climb, before eventually finding a new position and giving his all to get to the next jug. This is the best example of what climbing actually is; a lot of small failures mixed with figuring stuff out.

George Attempting a "Bat Hang"

    The most intriguing part about the climbing gym is that almost everything that looks random has a reason behind it. The tape isn't random. The numbers have meaning. The chalk is more than just a mess, and the crash pads aren't just giant cushions on the floor. Even the cramped shoes are designed with a specific problem in mind. Once you spend some time there, the wall just makes sense. When you see a climber looking up in a trance at the wall, you can see a sequence forming in their head. You see someone drag a pad 4 times the size of themselves underneath a part of the wall and you realize they are predicting where they might fall. You see Gavin looking at a sequence of rock and it's evident that he views the wall in an entirely different light since he helped create it. To the average student passing by the zone, it might just look like a wall covered in colorful plastic, but after spending time there, you conclude that it is a dynamic community, composed of equal parts puzzle, workout, and social space. And when the wall is torn down and reset for Climbfest, even the thing that now looks permanent, will eventually be converted into something entirely new.