Many Princetonians, watching in dismay as hirings were frozen and budgets slashed like tires, are now heralding an age of austerity on the Princeton campus. Clearly, these doomsayers have not visited the Outdoor Action Climbing Wall. Enclosed in a dreary corner of the Princeton stadium, the Wall—which stretches 32 feet high and over twice that length across—is a site of abundance. Climbers hang and whoop and fall from multicolored grips, they stretch across the thick, pliant flooring, they launch themselves, sans-rope, from hold to fiendish hold on around 30 bouldering routes, which require from their wiry suitors the proprioceptive abilities of a yogi and the raw plyometric powers of a footballer. The Wall is enclosed and air-conditioned—it extends across three sides of a tall, narrow, windowless room. Without the sign out front, you’d never know it was there. It is, by some measures, our campus’ finest art installation.
Admittedly, the hours of the Wall are limited, and somewhat unintuitive. Prospective mountaineers can count on two hours of open climbing each weekday, but that might mean 8pm-10pm, 4:30pm-6:30pm, or 10pm to midnight. I showed up on a Thursday, right at ten, and was greeted by a kind-looking, beanie-wearing sophomore named Ty Lipscomb. Lipscomb is one of the Wall’s 17 employees, and he looks the part—he’s got big arms, softshell pants, and a bright-orange traffic cone of a shirt. If you want to climb “top rope” (on a harness, and up the wall), you come to Lipscomb, or one of his peers. Unlike bouldering, Lipscomb tells me, top rope is “a lot more endurance-based—but there’s still a lot of technique, and whatnot.” Even so, most of these top-rope climbing techniques (from the delicacies of foot placement to the platitudes like “keep your hips close to the wall”) are designed to help climbers preserve their strength. Climbing, I quickly learned, targets muscles that non-climbers have never even heard of. By my second time up the Wall, my forearms were ready to explode.
“I think that one of the things that’s fun about climbing is that it’s inherently scary,” Lipscomb explained as he fiddled with the straps of my harness. “Your body tells you ‘be careful. Like, you’re gonna fall.’” And your body isn’t wrong—top rope climbers do fall, all the time. Between these climbers and their death or disfigurement is a thick synthetic rope and, at its end, a “belayer,” who uses an “Assisted-Braking Device” (which, when clipped to the hip, resembles a beefed-up carabiner) to monitor the amount of slack left in the line. If and when a climber falls, the rope snaps taut, having yanked itself into a friction-powered “pinch point” within the ABD. The climber, hanging like a gangly chandelier, shakes out their arms and tries again.
Belaying is easy, really (sometimes disconcertingly so—the knot used to “tie in” a climber, for example, can be learned in sixty focused seconds), but the consequences for a slip-up are severe. For this reason, Lipscomb and his peers must gather in the summer, like wildebeests, to earn their Advanced Gear Manufacturers Association (AGMA) Certification. “It’s two or three days,” Lipscomb tells me, “and this guy flies in from California, and he teaches you about the equipment…I mean, this guy’s job is he flies around and teaches these courses. And if you get certified, you work at the Wall. And you get pro discounts and stuff. It’s pretty nice.”
So far, so good—the Wall, which opened in 2007, has yet to see a major injury (remarkably, the same can be said for the Wall’s predecessor, which was built by volunteers in 1983 and served as a charmingly ramshackle community center until it was demolished to make way for the Frick Chemistry Laboratory). The staff of the Wall are an unharried bunch—not cool, exactly, but somehow in the know. They could tell a sloper from an undercling. “One of the fun things is watching people who have never climbed before, and who are super terrified, get really used to it,” Lipscomb told me. As if on cue, a breathless cry came from above: “Look out!” Lipscomb did as he was told, just dodging a pair of feet that came swinging from the Wall like a pendulum. Our assailant issued a brief apology before getting back to work. He was dressed in purple, from head to toe, and he’d been climbing upside down.
Besides the staff, a number of climbers have earned a sort of Wall-bound notoriety. Chief among them is Nivan Dhamija, a soft-spoken junior who likes to longboard to class. At one point, a man with an earnest expression and a pair of padded gloves asked me if I “climbed crack.” He was talking about a vertical fissure in the middle of the wall, into which experienced climbers learn to jam their fingers and toes (hence the gloves). Upon hearing that I didn’t, the man gestured over toward Dhamija. “Nivan climbs crack. He’s good.”
“Everyone here is too nice,” Dhamija told me. “I’m okay.” (He is, to be clear, an excellent climber). “I don’t strategize too much—I know people who really read the routes, but I like to just try it, and see what happens.” When I spoke to him, Dhamija was knee-deep in a new bouldering route: “Bruised My Ego,” an as-of-then unrated collection of unfriendly grips marked by strips of brown, pink, and blue tape (the staff would later label it a “V3-,” denoting intermediate difficulty). “I’m not really a boulderer,” Dhamija said, “so this is hard.” Bruised My Ego was set by Sarabeth Yao, a slender sophomore who’s been climbing since she was in grade school. “I’m just starting to set routes,” she said, “so I don’t think I’m great at it yet.” She’d come in an hour early with a tub full of holds, and, according to a pre-imagined series of moves, screwed a select few into the Wall. The route ran across a flat stretch of plywood, and it only ever rose a few feet up, so the installation wasn’t grueling—“the ceiling is a lot harder to set and strip,” Yao explained, “because you kind of have to anchor yourself upside down. I stripped a route there once, and it was extraordinarily difficult.”
Such is the rhythm of the Wall: old routes come down, new ones go up. For life-long climbers like Yao, this shifting field of holds is a training ground, a stepping stone, a stand-in for enduring sheets of gneiss or limestone. The Wall’s best and brightest look beyond it, to the Sourland Mountain of New Jersey, or the Shawangunk Ridge (the “Gunks”) of New York state. The Gunks, in particular, have been shaped by Princeton climbers—many dozens of now-established routes up the bullet-hard quartz of the mountain were pioneered by Princetonians. In 1974, Steve Wunsch ‘69 made climbing history by conquering “Supercrack,” a jagged, perilously narrow fissure that knifes down 70 feet of sheer rockface. At the time, it was considered the hardest route in the world.
For plenty of climbers, though, the Wall isn’t a stepping stone to the “real deal”—the Wall is the real deal. It’s a destination. It’s a third space, like a skatepark, or a library: conversations flow, dream-pop washes by, pizza boxes slant across a weathered folding chair. Do you climb crack? You don’t? Come learn. Come in. Come stay a while.
On the far side of the Wall, a group of students have congregated around another bouldering route, this one marked by peeling strips of neon tape. Midway through the route, climbers must make an awkward, flailing jump from a criss-crossed set of handholds to a roundish, protruding jug. These climbers are instrumentalists by trade—they play together in one of Princeton’s jazz ensembles—but they come, each week, to jump. Jasper Zimmerman, a bespectacled pianist, watches his bandmates with bemusement. “You get a nice sense of freedom,” he tells me, as a caterwauling trumpeter comes crashing from the wall. This is Theodore Peebles, the group’s impish ringleader, and he’s back on his feet in no time at all. “I’ve been coming here the longest,” Peebles tells me, grinning broadly. “He’s been coming here the second longest”—here Peebles points at Zimmerman—“and he’s been coming here the third longest.” The newcomer, Marcello Troncoso, is a well-dressed saxophonist who looks like the layman’s sketch of a climber—baggy jeans, chiseled features, curly hair wrapped underneath a white bandana. Troncoso’s been trying at the route for half an hour, now. He can reach the furthest hold (his fingers graze it every time he jumps), but he just can’t stick the landing. No matter, says Troncoso, battered and bemused — after all, “what does the Bible say? The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Wisdom thus dispensed, he turns back to the Wall.
Alexander Margulis is a contributing writer and section head for Second Look.