A Guide To Chapel Climbing

  5/26 8pm It is crunch time! I have done a lot of work in the past 12 hours to get everything wrapped up and ready for tomorrow. I have written 2000 words or so in the past 24 hours and it is so much fun seeing everything come together. While writing my reflection paper I realized that I have learned a lot in this project. Thinking about how other people will do a climb I make. It is almost like a cool form of self consciousness. It has also been fun to see my guide google doc grow from 3 pages to 10 pages, to now just under 30. I am looking forward to stapling my first paper copy and flipping through the pages one by one with the hope that many more people will too some day. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HF2Cfyog-h4gOy2LnvUZY_djIzy7Gerrp9EijzcF-q8/edit?usp=sharing I figured I would save the coolest photo for last. Daily Hours 5 Total Hours 57

  5/24 It was a good day. I got back out on the chapel and it just felt so good. The holds all seemed nice and the moves flowed together. I looked at probably the most climbed 5x10 stretch of wall. Last week Buz had told me about a route he used to do years ago. The route revolved around a sketchy side pull toward the top. The route itself is forgotten, but knowing the crux is enough to make something in its shadow. I came up with something much easier, but still fun. I decided to take a video of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s27cqy2fJPE In the evening I started work on the reflection paper for my senior project. I really like writing about the process. It is a good chance to step back and evaluate why something works which has been fun. I have a lot of work to do on the 25th getting everything prettied up to present, but it should all come together. Daily Hours 5 Total hours 52

  Week 2 Review The second week is done. At this point I have 2 days left to work before we present and I only need I believe 3 hours, so I am planning on going over a bit. Most of this week was spent writing. A mix of hot humid weather and black flies and mosquitoes made being out climbing not as desirable, but I am glad I still got out some. Writing about climbing has been an interesting experience. Climbing is such a visual and kinesthetic thing that capturing it in words takes a much better poet than myself. That said I think a decent amount of what I have written could be legitimately useful to someone if they read it. At the same time though, I would rather people at the chapel be climbing as opposed to reading, but at least it is there. With just about all of the writing done, my hope is to spend Monday and Tuesday as fun days making a few more routes for the book. Over all it has been a good time, and I think I am heading into a strong finish.

  5/22 What a day. My last Saturday on campus. My last time preforming on the proctor stage. Hot, humid, and swarming with mosquitos. At long last, amidst the bitter sweet chaos I managed to just about finish the written portion of my guide book. This means I should be able to spend my last two days of the project on the chapel having fun and climbing and making routes to my heart’s content. As for what I completed today, I spent a lot of the time coming up with exercises people can do climbing that train specific skills. It was an interesting task. Many I knew and just had to write a description and my personal advice and recommendations for. Also today I got some of the photos from the photo shoot I did with my friend Gunnar. Daily Hours 3 Total Hours 47

5/21 11pm Do you know how to describe the motion of climbing in a meaningful way? I don’t really. Today I tried writing a section on climbing technique. Trying to broadly state what makes for good technique is really difficult. Fortunately you can extract specific tips. Little concrete things someone can do to help their technique. Like stepping with the toe of the shoe instead of the heel or the ball because it lets you be more precise, and most shoes are designed with standing on the toe in mind. Of course I love writing thousands of words about visually simple things, but sometimes I have to use the shortcut of a picture. I think in these cases a thousand words just can’t quite cut it. This one is an example of the full crimp. A way of gripping a small hold to apply the maximum force. It is often overkill, but when you need it there is no way around it. Daily Hours 3 Total Hours 44

  5/20 Senior project aside, today was a great day. Performances of the musical have begun and it is overwhelmingly fun seeing it all come together. Speaking of things coming together I am getting close to having the guide book in a working condition. I need to write a bit more, but then all I will have left to do is add routes to my heart’s content. I will be totally transparent in saying that for the moment senior project has taken a little bit of a back seat to the rest of the exciting chaos transpiring. I will still get all of the hours and produce a good product, but today wasn’t the day to grind it all out. Part of why I think this is ok, is because today I learned we get 2 days of next week as part of this. I was under the wrong impression that we only had 2 weeks, and I was on pace to hit 50 hours in that time. Having a bit more flexibility means I can focus on more pressing matters for the day.  I know this really isn’t a great blog post, but I just want to be open. Daily Hour

  5/19 11pm Today I finally really got to work writing the written section, and figuring out what I need to say. I came out with this table of contents that I have been working through. It’s funny. I am actively writing things I kind of hope people will never actually read. It is all good information, and I need to state all of the safety stuff, but I think if people are at the chapel they should really be climbing, and I can’t imagine people seeking it as pleasure reading through their day. Some technique pieces could be valuable for someone while climbing so I want to put a lot of time into making those not just descriptive but useful. I hope to get back out on the wall tomorrow but I need to actually make the guide book before I get too carried away making more routes. After all, even if I don’t come up with a lot of great routes just having somewhere people can record their own might help proctor climbing a lot. Daily Hours 4 Total Hours 39

  5/18 11pm Today I thought about what the point of this guide book really is. On one hand I want to make a catalogue of routes for climbers to experiment with and enjoy. On the other hand, I want to provide a platform for everyone to make routes and have them preserved for the next year's team. Today I considered the point of all of this. I want to help new climbers find what makes climbing the chapel interesting and fun. It has a lot of potential to be great fun, and a practical tool to improve as a climber, but not everyone comes to see it that way. The chapel isn’t approachable and I want to make it more so. So I thought about how I could reach that end directly. After some encouragement from my mentor I spent part of today writing up this little story of how the chapel has evolved in my eyes over the years. I think with some revision and shortening it could be kind of an introduction to the book. Here is the first draft. It is awful but it has to start somewhere. Back in the f

  5/17 11pm Ah yes, another day. Part of me I was hoping for rain today, but I realized that is totally silly of me. I can take a day to not climb any time I want to work on all of the writing I still have to do. I actually need to take a day for that some time this week, because it really is the next step for me. However in the meantime I have come to a few conclusions. For one, I had for a while been debating about the format to represent climbs, and I think even though it is not too clean I am going to go for drawing on the photos to indicate the holds and what parts of them to use like I showcased a few days ago. It is a bit messy, but it is to the point. and clear. and practical and, Ties into my second conclusion. I want a way for people to add routes of their own to the catalogue. I thought about different ways but I just want something simple and robust. I am just going to make a separate google doc with a link to edit usable by anyone at proctor, on the good faith no one will

  Week one review Time sure flies. Already a week in but I feel like I have made good progress and I am on schedule with my expectation. Going into this I wanted to front load making routes in case of rain, and I have come up with a good selection and variety of routes so far. I would like to keep making more, but now I really need to start formalizing the documents and doing all the writing. There is a decent chance of rain on Monday which would be the perfect opportunity, or with black flies getting worse and worse I might only climb for an hour or so some days and spend the rest of the time getting everything else set up. Overall I am not worried, things are going pretty much as expected. I have a lot of work to do, but I have a decent amount of time to get it done. I know that so long as I am staying productive and focused this has the potential to be something really cool and useful for a long time to come. 

  5/15 10pm Did you know the black flies are out? I know the black flies are out. I am not certain of much in this world however, I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt it is now black fly season. Yeah, despite 3 springs here in NH this is the first time I have actually noticed black flies and wow, they suck. Anyway, when I am on the wall I am typically too focused to really pay them much mind, but the second I get down I am swarmed. I am finally looking to make hard routes instead of easy ones and it is much nicer. Something I have had fun doing is mimicking climbing styles from out on real cliffs, here on the chapel. For example, crack climbing is one of the most popular styles of climbing, but there aren't any cracks even remotely climbable on the chapel. Despite that By only using the sides of hold you can get a similar effect. This route uses only one side of holds to kind of emulate climbing the side of a crack. Ultimately it is not too faith full to the form but none the

  5/14 10pm Yet another solid day on the wall. Here nearing the end of the first week I feel like I have fallen into a steady rhythm. I get up at 6, climb from 8:30 till 12:30, and either climb more or do back end work for an hour before going to theatre in the afternoons and evenings for the mounting rehearsals as the musical performance nears. It is weird how things feel really busy and really still. I spend the first half of the day climbing where I can take all the time in the world trying to move 5 feet for an arbitrary goal. This is followed by 5 or so hours of the stress of learning lines and hitting notes and imagining a world in which I was not cast as someone with a British accent. It is just an interesting lifestyle for the moment. As far as climbing goes, I am pretty done trying to make easy routes. I am glad I spent a while doing it, but it is surprisingly hard to do. My talk with my mentor yesterday inspired me to try some of the hardest parts of old climbs and see if I c

  5/13 11pm It has been a long day, but for the most part a good one. Today was just as nice as you can ask for. 60s, sunny, gentle breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. I spent the first part of today with the routes the climbing team made my freshman year. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was pleased with what I found. A lot of the routes were tricky and interesting. I also came to a seemingly obvious revelation as to why so much of the climbing on the chapel feels awkward. It is the only place I have ever actually climbed a perfectly vertical face. If a face is slightly over hung or slightly less than vertical really dictates how it is climbed and when the face is strait up and down it doesn’t quite fit either style. I want to try and figure out and verbalize what the vertical style is like. Toward the end of the day I spend an hour or so with my mentor walking around and talking about the project and he shared some of the routes he remembered from decades past. I am going to

5/12 10pm Today was good. After talking with my mentor I decided to take it as a more mellow of a day. Trying to climb hard for hours every day is bound to be a fruitless endeavor. After a certain point your arms are just tired and the capability to do something interesting kind of goes away. I still put up some lines but mostly I looked around and did some prospecting on where I might put an interesting route. I discovered some interesting holds that despite years of climbing on these walls I have never used. Later in the day I did some digging to find something I was worried I had lost. My freshman year the climbing team actually made a book of routes. I think I have the only one left around and I want to scan it all soon. Tomorrow I want to try most of the routes. My hope is to include most of them in the book I am making for a bit more variety from my style, and because a lot of them look like really fun routes. Daily Hours 4 Total Hours 14

  5/11  8:15pm Today was a good solid day on the chapel. I started off the morning strong with making an interesting route that formed kind of an arch, with some horizontal traversing and some down climbing. Now last night I got a funny email from a friend of mine who happens to be a pretty good photographer with a nice camera, and if you know a good photographer with a nice camera then you know how nice they are to have around. An hour before lunch my friend Gunnar showed up to take the photos. We went around and got some pretty cinematic shots which I will be sprinkling in when I get them. Definitely a fun little detour from the route making. Speaking of making routes, right now I am trying to find the best way to represent them. So far I have just been doing these kinds of sketches. The red marks which hold are available and the purple indicates the general path for more complicated routes like this. This works (this one could use some cleaning up and written explanation ), but it

5/10/2021  6:30pm   I woke up this morning to the sound of rain and thought “Oh come on, really?”. I figured it was worth checking anyway to see if one side of the Chapel was dry and low and behold the whole thing was. Getting started was a little slow. As it turns out there is no great way to carry 3 coffee table sized crash pads across campus, but loaded down I made my way over and got set up. I kind of sat down and looked at the walls not really knowing where to begin. After some looking around I remembered one of the cooler lines I had climbed in the fall. I set up the pads and got into my rigid shoes and made it about 2 moves before having the realization, I haven’t climbed in months and have lost all of the calluses on my fingers. Something cool about the chapel is that it is all kinds of different rocks, but among them some are particularly nasty to pull up on. Sore fingers aside, I managed to put together 5 routes today. I think I will probably be able to do more than that in a