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General Climbing Discussion

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New climbing gym in Western Sydney 10-Feb-2010 At 8:04:39 AM garbie

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On 10/02/2010 pmonks wrote:
>On 9/02/2010 garbie wrote:
>>At the new place, what if we had a "hard" area, that we could even cordon
>>off on weekends?
>
>The gyms here make most of the hard (say, above grade 25 or so) climbs
>lead-only, which is a significant natural barrier for n00bs / bumblies
>(you can't lead in the gyms here until you've passed a lead test, and the
>test is pretty strict). By keeping the lead and top roping walls separate,
>the gym ends up naturally divided into lead / hard areas and top rope /
>easy to moderately hard areas.

Yep thats what I meant. The towers we're building will be 80% leading, with the whole western steep
side "top-rope free". Only one or two walls will overlap leading and top-roping, so that the top-ropers
can enjoy some steep terrain - they normally miss out. We have a system in mind to stop big swings
on the steep top-ropes. But we will have some easy leads, a lot more people are getting into leading at
St Peters these days and we need plenty of easy-moderate leads.

>
>As an aside, I think overhanging walls (even just gently overhanging)
>are way better from a training perspective - slabby walls in particular
>are just plain silly indoors, and even vertical walls are mostly a waste
>of space imvho.
>
Agreed - for climbers, but we need slabs etc for the noobies and not just them - regulars love the slab
as well.