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This week while I have not yet had the chance to attend the IM building climbing wall I will be attending after climbing club tonight. The Penn State Climbing Club met for the first time this semester last week on Thursday September first. While I was supposed to climb at the IM building after the first meeting I had run into a friend that I climbed with in Pittsburgh when I was younger. She and some of her friends from Penn State who are also climbers were going to Climb Nittany; a local climbing gym about a fifteen minute drive to the south of campus. I was offered the final seat in their car and since it had been a long time since I had gotten to climb at a real gym I happily went.

When I walked into the gym I was greeted by the desk workers and had to go through every climbers least favorite part of a new gym, the waiver. After completing the waiver I was able to begin my warmup. The average warmup should consist of about fifteen to twenty minutes of climbing below ones standard or project level of climbing. I will then normally follow this up with about ten to fifteen minutes of stretching. While it may seem unnecessary to some to warmup for nearly half an hour there are many different types of injuries that are not uncommon to climbers. Once properly warmed up I separated from the other climbers I was with. I wanted to work on the routes in the gym that I had not yet gotten the chance to climb that they had all got to climb in the past. I worked my way through what I thought looked fun and then moved onto what I thought looked difficult. When projecting the harder routes it’s important to remember that they will be there next time and one should not spend their whole time getting frustrated by one route. So once I finished what I could and felt it was time to rejoin the others I found them in front of something that was brand new to the gym, a spray wall.

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A spray wall is often on a layback wall or a wall that leans towards the climber. Then the gym will take a wide variety of hold sizes, types, and colors. This gives climbers the opportunity to create their own routes and practice moves that would not often be set otherwise. There are many types of spray walls that can be set up. While climb Nittany only has a basic one there are many gyms that have boards where the holds light up making it easier to keep track of the routes that climbers create. Although are nearly an infinite amount of spray walls there are two that are most well known: Moon boards and Kilter boards. Some of them have methods to keep track of the routes while others are just a wall that the gym decided to convert to a spray  wall to get use out of all the holds they weren’t using.