Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
Before Jayden Burton ever set foot on a rock climbing wall, he was a self-described redneck and never expected to be drawn into the sport.
It was Burton’s freshman year of college ,and a couple of his friends brought him to the rock wall in Reed Gym.
When he entered, he saw the gray climbing terrain spanning across the entire gym wall, longer than the basketball court in front of it. Dozens of climbing routes speckled the plywood boards, some angled 90 degrees, others with overhangs that climbers could dangle from.
And stretching up onto the ceiling was a climbing route that went well above the basketball court. Climbers must hold themselves upside down to reach the end.
“I’ll never forget the first route that caught my eye,” Burton said.
The route’s handholds were in half-moon crescents, and its climbing grade was 5.10, “a decently hard route,” Burton explains. “It’s not super difficult, but at the time it seemed impossible to me because I was just starting.”
Burton couldn’t do the route on his first try, but he kept coming back. He made it a goal to finish it, and a few months later, he was able to complete the climb.
“And from then I fell in love,” he said.
Burton is just one of many avid climbers who were introduced to the sport through ISU’s rock climbing wall. Burton, now a junior, is the ISU Rock Climbing Club president, and he’s been climbing three to four days a week ever since his first visit.
Peter Joyce, ISU’s outdoor recreation coordinator and manager of the climbing wall, was there at the construction and said it’s a wall that challenges the experts but also is a good introduction for the beginners.
“Anyone can come in here, regardless of their skill level, and have a great time,” he said.
Including the ceiling routes, there are over 50 top rope routes along the wall and at least 25 boulder routes at any given time.
Joyce joined the university faculty in 1996 and soon after butted heads with the wall’s architect, dissatisfied with the first design.
The architect told Joyce that the climbing wall he had designed would challenge “the best climbers in the country.”
“But how do I teach my beginners how to climb on this?” Joyce asked.
What the architect had designed was all the university could afford and would only cover about a third of the gym wall. Joyce didn’t know what to do at first, but then his team came up with a solution.
They realized that if ISU facilities constructed the wall, it would cost them the same amount to build what the architect had designed in addition to beginner-friendly routes.
So for the same price it would’ve taken a commercial contractor, ISU facilities set out on the construction of the first indoor rock climbing wall on a college campus in the entire country.
Twenty years later, the wall remains, enjoyed by countless avid climbers and beginners.
“The climbing gym industry has exploded,” Joyce said.
With that explosion has come respect of the sport. Joyce said in the 1970s, rock climbing was viewed as a “lunatic fringe” of sorts, but now most college campuses have climbing walls, and most towns have commercial climbing gyms.
It’s hard to know whether the rock climbing community has changed or the general public’s perception of it has changed, but for Luke Jepma, a wall attendant, “a big part of the draw for me was the community.”
Jepma, a senior at ISU, has been rock climbing for eight years now.
“It’s really positive in that the people you interact with are really friendly and excited about what you’re doing,” he said. “… Everyone is really stoked about what other people are doing within the community.”
Burton struck some of the same chords as Jepma.
“I think everyone there is just very accepting, and it’s one of the most laid-back environments on the campus,” he said.
Brenna Miller, who sets the rock wall’s routes, calls the climbing community a “whole new lifestyle that can’t be replaced with anything else.”
Like Burton, Miller got her start her freshman year in fall 2017 and has been climbing ever since.
“Once you start climbing, people climb for the rest of their lives,” Miller said. “Of course, you can come once a week for a couple of years and call it quits, but the people that you meet here, it’s a community that can’t be beat.”
Miller is one of ISU’s elite climbers who can make it all the way out to the end of the ceiling hang and do the route without taking any breaks. She said a lot of the people who attempt the ceiling hang and fail are more scared than they are physically incapable of making it.
“Climbing is a physical sport, but it is just as much a mental sport as it is physical,” she said.
Miller urged people who don’t feel ready for a route to not attempt it. She said that fear exists for a reason: to keep you safe.
“Then there’s times when you push past it … and you can mentally see that it’ll be okay or you’re willing to take the risk,” she said.
Before that first day in Reed Gym where he discovered a life-long love, Burton “never expected to be drawn into rock climbing.”
Whether he expected to or not, he was drawn into what used to be a “lunatic fringe” and he’s not likely to stop anytime soon.
“I think I overthink things too much, but when I’m climbing it all goes away and my head is just clear,” Burton said. “And then all that’s next is the next move and finishing the route.”
