As the days grew longer and warmer, climber Alan Quimby began to chase the shade around the canyon that gives Horseshoe Canyon Ranch its name.
The dude ranch, along with other nearby sites like the Atoka sandstone caprock of Sam’s Throne, make Newton County the state’s rock climbing mecca, even if summertime in Arkansas does not genuflect. Climbers favor fall and even winter.
So climbers like Quimby stay out of the sun while it’s still bearable in the shade until finally the sun and the bugs chase them — all the way indoors, to one of the state’s few indoor climbing facilities.
For Quimby, that’s the Little Rock Climbing Center, 4, 000 square feet of climbable area which is cavernous only in the way that warehouses are cavernous. Boxes of Swiffer Dusters sit near the inventory of rentable climbing harnesses and foot-binding shoes, less embarrassing than the lace-ups worn for bowling, but also less comfortable.
The dusters are used to sweep the chalk that settles to the floor out of the small sacks that experienced climbers lash to their belts like quivers.
The Little Rock Climbing Center was founded in 2003 by Logan Wilcoxson, a Colorado transplant who found remedying central Arkansas’ dearth of climbing opportunities a higher calling, so to speak, than working in marketing for a television station, which is what he was doing before he built the gym.
Colorado, Wilcoxson’s home state, has better climbing than Arkansas, the way that Arkansas has better climbing than any climbing gym could hope to — or so goes the conventional wisdom, that visitors to indoor climbing centers are biding their time between peakcondition seasons or have gotten used to compromising for the sake of convenience. But actually, as Wilcoxson says, “Eighty to 90 percent of our customers will never go climbing on their own.” As the season sends veteran climbers indoors, where they join parents taking their children in search of climbing walls like they enjoyed at Riverfest, and bouldering league nights with team names like No Ropes, No Harness, No Problem, here are five myths about indoor climbing that frequent climbers debunk, or at least semi-debunk. (Disclaimer: This deliberation is only valid until such time that Wii introduces a rock-climbing simulation and people start climbing not only indoors but in the indoors of their very own. )
1. Climbing indoors is a huge compromise made by people who would rather be climbing outdoors.
“Outdoor is definitely the cream of the crop,” says Quimby, a 26-year-old climber who works at a Little Rock engineering firm.
Quimby took up climbing after he crushed his jaw in a rodeo accident and decided his bucking bronco days were behind him. He did get back up on the horse. His accident happened in September 2005 and he was riding again by that Thanksgiving, but only at a tame lope. He gets up on the wall at the Little Rock Climbing Center several nights a week and usually stays three or four hours.
Outdoor climbing in the state’s more metropolitan areas is scant. An “Adventures” off-shoot Web site of the main Arkansas State Parks site lists Pinnacle Mountain as a rockclimbing alternative, but climbers in the know tend to dismiss it as unchallenging. (Park staff members don’t always know to direct first-time climbers to it; in a recent call to the park’s main number, two workers each denied there were rock-climbing options in the area. )
And although climbers began scaling crags on Shinall Mountain (the west Little Rock formation home to cell phone and radio towers and whose name is the provenance of the more bonnily spelled Chenal Valley ) long enough ago to have nicknamed routes like “Bo Diddley” and “Lumberjack” and to hyperbolize the area’s large, climberdaunting centipedes, conscientious climbers are heeding the “No Trespassing” signs that have appeared as ownership issues have gotten thorny. This halts climbing traffic that dated back at least to the 1970 s.
That leaves climbers who don’t have the time to drive to Sam’s Throne, Horseshoe Canyon or Mount Magazine, or the inclination to broil in the sun, scuttling indoors.
“I would prefer outdoors, but of course in the summer it’s pretty uncomfortable,” affirms Elaine Gimblet, who works out at the air-conditioned Little Rock Climbing Center every Monday, Wednesday and Friday beginning around noon. “Even with the fans on us and the A / C, you still just sweat up a storm.” But that’s the thing: Whether or not they would rather be outdoors, climbing is done by people who would rather be alive, and sweaty hands aren’t good for getting a grip.
And people tend to develop great affection for their climbing gyms and the camaraderie that develops under the fluorescent lights.
“My daughter and I watched it being built,” says Gimblet, who already had rock scrambling, a gear-less form of free climbing, under her belt from time spent in Arizona. “We were anxiously awaiting it.” Gimblet and her husband, Ron, often meet there to climb with six or seven of their friends.
“We encourage each other, we chastise each other — if you’re having a little bit of difficulty, someone will say, ‘There’s a good hold at your knee, ’” she says. “We talk a lot. Some people would tell you we talk way too much.
“ It’s the one thing that we really do love,” Gimblet adds. “I’ve been running for 25 years, and, you know, you get tired of it and it’s hot, but climbing is one thing there are no negatives to.” 2. The gear is complicated, uncomfortable and tedious to adjust to fit after being used by someone else.
Renting climbing shoes is a little like renting tuxedo pants — the size will sound larger than you’re used to wearing, but then you’ll put them on and they’ll be too tight.
In this case, it’s purposeful pinching, for better grip.
Sophisticated climbing gyms like Little Rock Climbing Center have gear for rent or for purchase.
Gimblet is a buyer, not a renter.
“I would really advise people to get their own,” she says. “If you’re getting different shoes and a harness every time, you have to readjust. With mine, all I do is step into it. I have my own chalk. It takes about two minutes to get ready to go. If you had to adjust, that’s a little more trouble.” But if you do want to rent, the complete gear set-up at the Little Rock gym goes for $ 5 on top of a day pass that costs $ 10 for adults and $ 8 for children 12 and under. A month’s membership costs $ 65, gear rental included, with breaks given for an ongoing, automatically renewed membership.
3. Only hip, young guys work out there and you’ll feel old unless you’re under 21 and even then you might still feel uncool.
Walking into the Little Rock Climbing Center can feel a little like walking into a trendy restaurant you’re underdressed for. The opportunity for faux pas and missteps that will hang a neon novice sign above your head seem as abundant and finely particled as all that chalk.
If you rainbow-route it — climber-talk for ignoring the color-coded tabs that indicate holds charted into a route — and grab whatever will heave your body one pull farther, will that group of shirtless guys who look like they all grew up together snicker at you (especially the one who looks and swings from the wall like a dreadlocked Tarzan )?
If you grab one of the novelty holds — outcroppings that don’t even try to resemble rock formations found in nature, like the Hulk fingers, the underbiteshaped teeth or the smiley-face — will you advertise yourself as a dabbler ?
Probably not. This is a place, after all, that pipes in Motown and the Carpenters. Sometimes even Gimblet, 61 and a retired civics teacher who climbs with Louise Armstrong, a North Little Rock police officer, feels younger and hipper than the atmosphere.
“One night they were playing something out of the Big Band era,” Gimblet recalls. “It would have really been enjoyed by my parents. I said, ‘ How old do you think we are !?’ “ We’re pretty much an anomaly as far as the age,” she admits. “But I don’t mind climbing with much better and younger climbers.
“ When you need a belayer,” she says, referring to belaying, when one half of a climbing duo stands on the ground and uses a rope to protect his partner from landing on the ground in case of a fall, “it doesn’t matter how old they are.” “It doesn’t matter who you are,” Quimby agrees. “I’ve seen doctors climb with mechanics. This guy is a lawyer and this guy is a trash man and they’ll climb together. All social stuff like that goes out the window.” 4. Climbing, either indoors or out, is only for hyper-fit, muscle-bound types.
“Body builders have a tough time, actually,” Wilcoxson says of who does and doesn’t make a good climbing specimen.
There’s a reason teenage girls who’ve done gymnastics tend to pick up climbing fairly easily: They’ve developed the long, lean upper-body muscles climbers need. Plus, they don’t have a lot of extra bulk to haul around, and they’re used to chalking their hands for better grip on the equipment.
Gimblet and her climbing partner Armstrong were weight training at the YMCA before they took up climbing.
“We discovered the climbing was building our upper body a whole lot more, and it was a heckuva lot more fun,” she reports. “We stopped the weight workout, and [yet ] we can really tell a difference in our arms and shoulders and back.” 5. Finding a compatible climbing partner is a difficult process, and once you have one you spend half your time on the ground staring up at what he’s doing.
Well, it could be worse: You could spend two-thirds of your time on the ground staring up at what your partners are doing.
Gimblet, husband Ron and their friend Armstrong actually climb in a trio.
“Three is perfect,” Gimblet contends. “You’re doing a little bit of effort when you belay, so if you have three, there’s one turn when you’re resting and not doing anything.” But some people have enough trouble just finding one suitable belay partner. (Overheard recently from a picnic bench at the Little Rock Climbing Center — First teenage boy: Do you want to belay me more ? Second teenage boy: I’m tiiiiired. First teenage boy again: Want to go see a movie ?)
And then there’s what could be called the belay delay, that downtime when one climber shows up earlier than his partner, and has to kill time stretching and wondering whether Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World, a book advertised on a poster in the gym, is any good.
“Climbing partners are hard to come by,” says Quimby. The climber maintains that he’ll climb with anybody — once. In search of a partner, he has posted a flier in the center: climber ISO (in search of ) same.
“I trust them to save my life. I trust them to catch me if I fall,” he says. “But trusting them to show up is the hard part.” Quimby recently had a climbing partner flake on him because the guy was chatting with his girlfriend online and lost track of time. More often, they move away.
“Climbers are kind of nomadic, I guess you could say,” he says.
One recent night, Quimby was set to re-team with a former climbing partner lost in a relocation to Alaska. The man had just moved back from the Land of the Midnight Sun the day before. “I’m pretty stoked he’s back,” Quimby says.
Learning to cooperate with a climbing partner “can happen in just a couple of routes,” Quimby says. “But it depends on the person. Sometimes it can take a while, and sometimes you just never jibe.” Meeting up with a belay partner for the first time can be a little like a blind date, Quimby allows.
“It’s like, ‘ OK, what are you going to be wearing so I’ll know what you look like, ’” he jokes.
And if things don’t work out, how does one break up with a climbing partner ?
“I guess,” Quimby ventures, “you could move to Alaska.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
