Cameron Nimetz stands with two of his teammates gazing up at one of Gravity Lab’s 16-foot bouldering walls as the three young men try to solve “the problem” – a series of small green plastic holds on an overhung surface pitched back over the climbing gym’s padded floor.
He saunters away from the two and starts up the series of holds in a familiar pattern of movements before he slips, hurtling a few feet back to the ground.
It is Monday afternoon – one of the last opportunities for Nimetz and his 16 teammates to train before Saturday, when Gravity Lab will host its first USA Climbing competition. The organization is the nation’s governing body for climbing competitions and manages the American Olympic team.
Competitive climbing sprawled onto the international stage after the sport made its Olympic debut in 2021. Indoor climbing has existed since the late 1980s and competitions began around the same time. But, following the release of hit climbing movies such as “Dawn Wall” and “Free Solo” in the 2010s, the historically countercultural sport has become increasingly mainstream and the interest in competition has grown.
In Durango, a town with ample rock climbing scattered within a half-hour drive of downtown, opportunities to compete are scarce. Almost as soon as the gym opened last year, Gravity Lab Co-owner Sebastiaan Zuidweg said parents and kids alike were asking when it would start a competition team.
“The need was there,” he said. Now, the gym has an 18-climber team with competitors from ages 8 to 18.
Although Nimetz, 18, has been a climber since he was 7, he had never competed before Saturday.
“I’m psyched,” he said, expressing excitement in common climber lingo at practice Monday afternoon. “… I’m not into climbing to be better than other people, it’s more to push myself. But it’s cool to be out in the community climbing with these kids. You get a lot better when you have a little competition.”
Indeed, Zuidweg and the Gravity Lab Coach and Head Routesetter Charlie Malone say the youth competition team is much more about providing an opportunity to the community than it is about winning.
“A lot of what I secretly love about climbing is that it caters to kids who typically don’t fit so well with big sports teams,” Zuidweg said. “It’s not a team sport in the sense that your team is all playing on a field. In one sense, it's a very individualized sport. But the camaraderie and cheering and support is so communal.”
Registration for the event topped 70 climbers, who will travel from across USAC Region 41, which includes southern Colorado, most of Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.
The Durango competition is one of 10 leading up to the regional throwdown, which will take place in Boulder on Jan. 13.
Gravity Lab’s team could be at a disadvantage when the spring climbing season rolls around. The climbing shifts from bouldering, which involves a short series of difficult moves with no ropes, to sport climbing, which consists of climbing much taller walls with ropes. Gravity Lab’s limited roped real estate mean the team has to get creative to train for the more endurance-focused season.
But not for long, Zuidweg says.
The gym has a pending planning application for an expansion that would double the size of the climbing area and include 45-foot high lead climbing walls, communal work space and kid-specific climbing areas.
“If things go well, we’d be breaking ground sometime in 2024,” Zuidweg said.
Regardless of the current challenge, Malone, the team’s coach, says medals are perhaps a secondary goal to most of the climbers.
“A lot of the pressure that the kids feel, they put on themselves,” he said. “But when it really comes down to it, all the team kids are climbing with each other, they’re all having fun. It really just turns into a session of working rock climbs.”
Malone sees climbing as a personal endeavor and an exercise in self-growth. The development that accompanies the process of becoming a better climber has applications far beyond the gym’s walls – and Malone sees it as one of his job duties to encourage that development in the team’s climbers.
“Climbing is unique in the sense that it becomes a personal journey pretty quickly,” he said. “… When it really comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if you’re sending, it doesn’t matter if you’re falling. It matters how you are approaching the whole problem.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
