Routesetting: Starting At The Bottom

I am at the start of a new adventure, and I’ve decided to share some of my experiences along the way. Dustin has agreed to take me on as an apprentice routesetter!

It’s been over two and a half years since I started on the whole project of opening a climbing gym, and more than a year and a half since we opened the gym. I learned a phenomenal amount during the design and construction stages, and again in the early months of operation. We have added many layers to the simple offerings that we started with, and each of those additions has brought new lessons with it. This continuing opportunity to learn new things is probably the best part of what I’ve been doing. In the past few months though, the learning opportunities have been fewer, and I’ve been looking for something new to do. During the summer I asked Dustin if he would help me learn how to set routes, and he agreed. A knee injury delayed my ability to act on that, but last week we got started.

I should admit that this is not really the best use of my time. I’ve been realizing recently that I ought to be spending less of my time working in the gym (Clint and I generally run the joint from noon to 5pm each weekday before the part-time staff come in), and more of my time growing the business. The gym is making money now, but not as much as it can, and my focus should be reaching out to bring in more school groups and corporate groups, especially during the quiet weekday hours. And I am doing that, but I also feel the need to do something new to stretch myself and teach me new skills. So I’ll be spending a few hours a week learning about routesetting, and finding out whether or not I can be any good at it. The other benefit to doing this is that I have not been climbing enough, and I expect the hard work of routesetting to help make me stronger and help my climbing. Most people assume that a gym owner gets to climb in his gym all the time, and is necessarily a great climber. In fact I spend most of my time working the front desk and teaching Introductory Lessons, as well as tending to the myriad tiresome tasks such as paying the bills and looking after bookkeeping &payroll, as with any business. I’ve been climbing once or sometimes twice a week, and remain largely stuck in the 5.9/5.10- range.

I do have a little experience at this. I set boulder problems on the home walls I’ve had at my last 2 houses, and one day in 2009 Andrew McBurney let me set a couple problems at Boulderz as I was starting to learn about the climbing business. He had to fix both my problems after I thought I was done; I had made the classic error of setting what I wanted to climb rather than the grade I was told to set!

Anyway, last Thursday Dustin and I got started on my training. The first session was all about rigging. Unlike climbing, routesetting has the setter alone on the wall, and when setting from a rope there is more involved in keeping yourself safe when you have no belayer to help out. If you have wondered why our gym has bolt hangers attached at the bottom of our walls, it’s mainly to support safe rigging for routesetting. I learned a little about rigging as part of my ACMG Climbing Gym Instructor certification course 2 years ago, and asked Eldorado Climbing Walls to install the hangers along the base of the walls to support anchoring the ropes when routesetting. This was important because our belays are not anchored (gyms with anchored belays can use those anchors when setting). It turned out the hangers are also pretty useful to keep top-ropes out of the way of lead climbers, but that was just a happy side benefit.

The first part of my rigging lesson was learning to tie some new knots: a figure eight on a bight (I had seen this before and it was easy to master), and a clove hitch. This turned out to be the hardest part of the lesson for me. I think my 3D spatial skills are not very good (strange for someone who spent 25 years working in the field of 3D computer animation?), and it took me a while to master the clove hitch. I felt pretty stupid during this part, but Dustin was patient with me. I spent most of the session practicing these knots, and setting up an anchor (figure eight on a bight at the base bolt hanger, clove hitch on the first draw above it) both from a ladder and from a rope. I think I drove Dustin slightly crazy with a lot of questions, as I always want to understand why things work the way they do, and am rarely satisfied just learning how to do something. He also explained that as with other aspects of climbing, there are multiple safe ways to do all of this.

Going up a rope on your own (without a belayer) involves some extra gear. In addition to the Grigri attached to your harness, you need:

• an ascender: a device that attaches to the rope above you, gripping it as you pull yourself up, and then sliding up for the next step
• an aider or etrier: a piece of webbing that hangs down from the ascender with a loop at the bottom where your foot goes in to push yourself up
• a quickfix: a piece of webbing that attaches to your harness and has a carabiner at the other end to let you attach yourself to quickdraws as you go up the wall. This allows you to unweight the rope as you ascend, which is necessary while you are attaching the clove hitch to the first draw. It also helps you work close to the wall without swinging while setting.

So there’s a lot more going on with all this stuff set up. Going up the wall is a combination of sliding the ascender up the rope, stepping down in the aider, and pulling on the brake line to pull the slack in the rope through the Grigri. Every once in a while you tie an overhand knot in the brake line, as a stopper in case somehow the cam on the Grigri gets depressed to release its braking action (which is not at all likely to happen, but we always want backup safety measures). Without your hands and feet on solid holds you’re swinging around a lot more, which can be a little uncomfortable. I think I’ll get used to that as I do this more.

Once I had gotten all of this clear in my head, Dustin had me set my anchors, and jug my way to the top of the wall. “Jugging” means moving up the rope by alternately pulling on the ascender with one hand, stepping into the aider with the opposite foot, and then pulling the slack rope through the Grigri with the other hand. I had climbed and done yoga the night before (yes, I have my excuses ready…), and jugging my way to the top of the wall was really hard work; I had to rest on the way up! When I got to the top he then had me haul up a bucket full of holds (typical of what might be needed to cover most of a route). I already knew that our routesetters work really hard to set each route, but this practice drove it home. Doing this is definitely going to make me stronger!

That was it for lesson 1. I still need more practice at all these skills before I’ll feel really comfortable at it. And I need to be extra careful and disciplined about double checking every part of my rig, because there is no climbing partner to do that for me. I’m probably in the Conscious Competence stage of learning now, and I need to get to Unconscious Competence before I’ll have enough of my brain available to really start thinking about the routesetting process itself!