A climbing wall is an artificially constructed wall with grips for hands and feet, used for climbing. Some are brick or wooden constructions, but on most modern walls, the material used for the wall is a thick multiplex board with holes drilled into it at regular intervals. They generally have a place to attach a belay rope, but may also be used to practice lead climbing.

Each hole contains a specially formed t-nut to allow modular hand holds to be screwed on to the wall. The face of the climbing surface is covered with a variety of textured products including concrete and paint and/or polyurethane loaded with sand. In addition to the textured surface and hand holds, the wall may contain additional surface structures such as small indentions (incuts) and protrusions (bulges), or take the form of an overhang, underhang or crack.

Some grips are specially formed to mimic the conditions of outdoor rock, including some that are oversized and can have other grips bolted onto them.

History

As with outdoor rock climbing, the concept of an artificial climbing wall was started in the UK. The first wall was created in 1964 at Leeds University by Don Robinson, a lecturer in Physical Education, and involved inserting pieces of rock into a corridor wall. From these humble beginnings the first commercial wall was built in Sheffield, traditionally England's centre for climbing due to its proximity to the Peak District.

Types of Wall

There are several different types of wall consisting of different holds and wall surfaces.

Arguably the simplest type of wall is of plywood construction, known colloquially in the climbing community as a 'woody', with a combination of either bolt-on-holds or screw on holds. Bolt-on-holds are fixed to a wall via one or more iron bolts which are inserted through the hold in question, which will have specific bolt points, and then fixed into pre-allocated screw-threaded holes in the wall. Screw-on-holds are, by contrast, usually much smaller, owing to the nature of their fixing. These holds are connected to the wall by one or more screws which may be screwed directly into the wall's surface.

Other types of wall include real slabs of granite brought onto site and textured (featured) carbon fibre walls such as those manufactured by Bendcrete.

Routes and grading

Grips come in different colours, those of the same colour often being used to denote a route, allowing routes of different difficulty levels to be overlaid on one another. Coloured tape placed under climbing holds is another way that is often used to mark different climbing routes. In attempting a given route, a climber is only allowed to use grips of the designated colour as handholds but is usually allowed to use both handholds and footholds of the designated colour and surface structures and textures of the "rockface" as footholds.

The grade (difficulty) of the route is usually a consensus decision between the builder of the route and the first few people who climb the route.

Many indoor climbing walls have people who are assigned to set these different climbing routes. These people are called route setters.

See also Indoor climbing

Climbing

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