When I was done, I had only put fifteen holds on the entire wall! I knew people would either hate it or love it, and so far the feedback has been positive. One thing I wanted to emphasize, however, was that despite the lack of plastic on the wall, this climb is not height dependent! To demonstrate, I had CityRock youth team climber Ryan get on this thing.

Slab Route Beta Video from Patrick_Manitou on Vimeo.

Now what follows is the blow-by-blow beta for the route. Read along as Ryan climbs if you’re looking for beta. In the future we may do this sort of video for more tricky climbs and incorporate the beta right into the commentary on the video.

The first move looks daunting, but it’s not. Grab the start hold, smear with one foot, hike the other up onto the only foot (at four feet off the ground, no less). The key to this move is either using your momentum and pulling inward off the start hold. When done right this move is not dynamic. Next comes the corner mantle move, which involves a tricky hand-foot match on the pink rail. You’ll not Ryan has trouble with this until he gets his right hand on the orange dagger on the right wall. This is the key to this move, and lots of climbers miss this. With the right on the dagger, you can press yourself high enough to get your foot onto the pink rail. Once you’re established in the corner, the most interesting move of the route is ahead of you. This is the only time you may ever hear “your next hold is eight feet to your left!”. Balance is key as you work your way slowly across the pink rail until you get close enough to blue to go for it. It’s fun! Now swing your feet onto the orange chicken-head out left and press down on the blue jug in order to reach the black crimp. The next few moves are straight-forward as long as you us the undercling correctly. Finally comes the green lego-tufa feature. Many people miss the foot on the right wall, but this is the key to making the finish of the route as effortless as possible. Think of this section as a chimney; stem between the wall and the tufa until you can get high enough to mantle and stand up, and you’ve done it!

Check out results at the main CityRock page, and also the Gazette’s OutThereColorado website for some awesome pics!

Thanks to all the competitors and setters, it was a great day on the boulder at CityRock.

This past weekend, nearly a dozen setters, mostly CityRock staff setters but a few others as well, gathered for a setting clinic lead by the talented Lance Hadfield and Matt Moore out of Albuquerque’s Stone Age climbing gym. As setters, we worked on finding new lines and movement, along with modifying plastic to expand our creativity. As a crew, we focused on teamwork and improving how we give and get feedback. More than anything, it was great to get everyone together in one room and talk about how we can keep setting better and keep the psych level high!

Speaking of psych level, we’ve got our first big competition of the season coming up, with the arrival of the American Bouldering Series on Sept. 17th. We’ll be setting 50 boulder problems in just a week, so bear with us as we tear down and re-build the boulder. It’ll be so worth it to have a bunch of rad new problems, and we’re really going to step up the level of setting. Expect a lot of craziness!

And if you’re interested in climbing with the setters, we’re trying out a “session with the setters” on Wednesday nights, six to eight. The idea is to help with beta, get feedback, and have a good time- our first session quickly devolved into a wacky game of add-on. Good times indeed!

And finally, as if you haven’t noticed yet, we’re expanding the route wall! Construction has already begun, and we’re hoping to have things up and done in just a few months! The model of the new addition is usually sitting near the south end of the boulder, so make sure to check it out. Additions include a speed-climbing wall, a large overhanging column, an old-school chimney (!!), and plenty of clean lines.

One last note: if you see Josh doing any setting in the gym, make sure to ask him about his golf game!

The basic idea here is to let climbers suggest grades and rate the quality of a climb. There are a couple downsides- the tags are bigger, and take up more wall space, which is a bit of a problem on the boulder. Also, the quality ratings don’t say much about what specific part of a climb was either awesome or terrible. On the flip side, climbers with a limited amount of time can focus on only the highly rated climbs, and the space issue on the boulder isn’t a huge deal.

So what do you guys think?

With this in mind, we’ve put up a few problems on the vertical backside of the boulder, as well as the ‘diamond’ section of the boulder that features vertical into slab movement.

On the flat wall, I set a V2 called “streeeetch” that requires some long, although not necessarily reachy, moves. With the right balance and footwork, even a short climber can make the long, traversing moves, assuming they focus on their body position and how to lean away from side-pulls and underclings. This thing is all about fighting the barn-door. And trust me, you can reach, seeing how sub-five foot Lance flashed this thing easily!

Also on the flat wall, I put up a tricky little problem that sits somewhere between V4 and V6, depending upon your sloper strength and balance. A true equalizer. Here’s a little beta- a heel hook will help with the proper hand sequence, and that’s all I’m going to reveal. The grade is up in the air, but regardless, be proud if you send!

On the Diamond, Max set a couple of V4/5 problems that both involve tricky throws around blind corners, and both require long, slow and deliberate movement; dynamic throws wont work on these problems. It’s all about that moment when you’re inching your way toward a hold, wondering if you’re going to snag the next hand hold before you slip off the meager slopers and miniature foot chips.

Go check ‘em out and let us know what you think!

Also, as a reminder, Monday, June 20th we’re having a chair painting party at the gym. Come in between 5-10 pm and immortalize yourself by painting a chair that will live in perpetuity in CityRock’s living room area!

I wasn’t able to attend, but quite a few CityRockers made the trip up, and from all reports it was a great weekend. If you get a chance, say congrats to Kyle and ask him about the experience. In the meantime, here’s a little video of some of the action.

In related news, SCC’s Austin Geiman finished 12th, just behind Daniel Woods. Congrats on the awesome climbing!

That said, we are thinking about playing with the way we use route cards. One idea is to place the climb’s main grade next to an upper and a lower suggested grade and let people put a check mark next to what they feel is proper. Or we could put up a white board with all the routes listed and let people comment on them. We’re open to ideas, so what do you think would be the best way to encourage feedback?

One key here is that we use a lot of directional jugs to get people to move their bodies out of the rigid, shoulders-square-to-the-wall position most beginners have. This means using lots of positive holds in any direction other than up. If it’s a traversing problem, I’ll use a lot of side-pulls, since they force a climber to lean into an opposing position from the hold, and the more they lean, the better the hold feels. This also allows for some very long reaches that beginners might not otherwise have thought possible.

I recently set a roof problem on the arch of the boulder that specifically illustrates heel and toe hooking. The problem is an easy V1 if you heel hook, or much harder otherwise. I’ve seen plenty of strong guys use brute force campusing to send, but it’s great to watch smarter climbers figure out how to use their legs to support their weight.

What I wish more new climbers would understand is how to read these kinds of problems. We’re very intentional in how we position holds, and on easy climbs in particular, you can get a good sense of the intended sequence by looking at the pattern of how the holds are rotated. If one jug is facing right, and the next hold is facing left, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. If two hold are both facing right, however, it might be a clue to bump the same hand from one hold to the next, or if there are feet set in a certain way, it might be a lay-back sequence. It’s all about getting into the motions of climbing.

Indoor climbing grades are notoriously soft, sometimes due to random grade inflation, but more often due to intentional efforts by the gym to make climbers feel better about their abilities. It’s good for business, the thinking goes, if climbers are psyched to suddenly be sending hard climbs. But the fallacy falls apart as soon as they step up to real rock.

At CityRock, we first shoot for consistency within the framework of the gym. It’s not fun to crush a 5.10c and then flail on the 5.9 next to it (although trust me, outdoors, old-school 5.9 is the hardest grade you’ll ever climb; back in the day 5.9+ must have been code for sketchy 5.11).

As long as our grades are consistent with themselves, we’re pretty happy. But we also want them to be accurate, and this raises a hard question- just what exactly is accurate grading? Should we compare our grades to other gyms? to local outdoor spots? All the way back to Yosemite where the whole grading system originated?

Grades vary from region to region, to be sure. In my experience, the midwest is a whole grade or two harder than Colorado grades, and newer spots like Joe’s Valley in Utah seem to be easier than Colorado.

It might seem logical then to compare our grades to local spots, but this isn’t all that easy, either. Would we pick the old school, sandstone sandbags of the Garden of the Gods? The slab-fests at Red Rocks Canyon? What about the cracks and domes of the South Platte? All three are definitely close, but don’t really compare to gym climbing. A better spot might be Shelf Road. Although Shelf isn’t the closest climbing spot, it’s probably the most popular sport climbing destination in the region. But problems arise here too, since climbs at Shelf tend to fall into one category- vertical pocket pulling, endurance tests. CityRock has routes like this, but we also have lots of steep terrain, and we try to set in all different kinds of styles.

The same issues crop up in bouldering. Locally, we have just three bouldering areas- the Snake Pits at the Garden, Ute Valley, and Ute Pass. Between these three spots, only Ute Valley has a published guide with grades. Yet even in the guide, there are only a handful (or fewer) problems in any given grade. For instance, Ute Valley has only one consensus V5, and that’s Center Route (also known as Floater). It’s hard to base grades for all different kinds of boulder problems off just one V5 in the area.

Not to mention the issue of grade inflation outdoors. Of the well-known problems at the Snake Pits, all seem to have been upgraded several grades in the last fifteen years, although the problems themselves haven’t changed. For example, the overhanging west face of Mongoose block was considered V2 back in the 90s. Now consensus places it at V4. The crimpy east-face of the Fang boulder? Originally V3, now I hear people calling it V5.

So grades are hard, and everything breaks down when you start looking at it too hard. But we’re always open to suggestions. Setters have thick skin, it’s not going to hurt our feelings to tell us what you think about the grades, or anything else for that matter. So have at it.