crack rack at rocks and ropes

behold its radiant glory:

i want one. it would be sweet to be able to train crack technique without having to drive several hours away from town. i know wood isn't exactly like rock, but...plastic is quite different from rock too, and we climb on that all the time because it helps our performance outdoors.

is such a device desirable to anyone else? does this arcane, mystical technology hold a certain awe and reverence that inspires dreams of...well...not sucking quite so much the next time you encounter a thin hand jam?

They are very easy to build and very beneficial for training.

seems to me it would be possible to build the actual "crack" part of the fixture out of the thin cement board used for tile underlayment. You could rig some sort of system to warp the strips to suit the crack you wanted to climb. The texture of cement board would be more like rock than wood.

however you decude to build them, it can't be that difficult. lots of gyms have them--dare i say that the vast majority of gyms have at least some way to train crack technique?

whenever we find a crack on mount lemmon or the surrounding area we rate it up a full number grade harder than someone from moab or california would. then the outsiders roll into town and laugh at our cute little ratings for cracks. are we going to stand for that? are we?? i see them laughing in my dreams, and it hurts. it hurts me deep. real deep. i weep tears of blood for my homeland of tucson. sometimes i wake up at night, shivering from the heartache and the agony. no exaggeration whatsoever.

ROFLMAO

I wouldn't mind doing crack in the gym. I mean *climbing* cracks in the gym.

YES! Let's keep this thread going. Maybe Rocks & Ropes could be convinced to build one of these. It could easily go just to the left of the counter as you enter, on the left wall that's behind the 2nd story walkway. It would only take up one rope that probably rarely gets used at the moment.

Can one of you Rocks & Ropes employees make Jason aware of this thread?

After the royal @ss-kicking I recieved trying to climb some of the cracks on Moonlight Buttress, I would love to see that type of thing in Rocks & Ropes.

I always wished an overhanging handcrack would appear next to the magazine racks, and next to that an offwidth that I could whine my way up. Also, they should remove the stairs to the bouldering area and make a chimney to be used as the new access. While I am wishing, fill the pro shop with kittens and puppies.

Yeah I have tried to practice my crack climbing on the boulder downstairs but its just a little big for my hands to get a hand jam. It would be awesome to put something in to Rocks and Ropes.

Jon Ruland wrote:whenever we find a crack on mount lemmon or the surrounding area we rate it up a full number grade harder than someone from moab or california would. then the outsiders roll into town and laugh at our cute little ratings for cracks. are we going to stand for that? are we?? i see them laughing in my dreams, and it hurts. it hurts me deep. real deep. i weep tears of blood for my homeland of tucson. sometimes i wake up at night, shivering from the heartache and the agony. no exaggeration whatsoever.

Woah! Did any of you Tucsonians 'fess up to Amanda Marie that there are not cracks to be found in the fair land?

This needs to be cross-posted at "Moving to Arizona" immediately, or y'all are lookin' at a big hairy fraudulent inducement case!

Sign me up. I'm up in the Bay Area this week for work, and loving the built-in cracks at Planet Granite in Sunnyvale.

clearly there is a lot of interest for some crack-training technology. now we need to convince the necessary people that it will be worth the investment. if i were a business owner, i wouldn't want to spend money on anything that didn't benefit the business.

i think a crack rack would result in more "outdoor-only" climbers who don't normally visit rocks and ropes to visit the gym since it is otherwise nearly impossible to train crack technique in the tucson area. this will result in an increase in revenue for rocks and ropes due to increased membership.

this is all speculation of course, but i can have my people conduct an official study on the costs and benefits in the near future.

I actually asked if they were going to add a crack when they were doing the new construction. I got told pretty bluntly that "NO!" we are not building a crack. Of course I am just one person who barely goes in there and who knows how many other people asked that same question.....BUT, if there was one in there, I would be in it getting worked.

I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Think of all the other small things that people have asked for like more leadable routes, cruxes that don't require long reaches, and even holds that have been cleaned at least once in the past decade. All of these are more simple than building a crack which can be complicated if you want to do it right. Plus, everyone thinks they would use an indoor crack to train on but in reality the novelty would wear off pretty quickly. I've spent a lot of time at gyms that do have cracks and you would rarely see people on them. Maybe once a night, maybe. I do find it funny how few people in town can even handjam. Jon is right about the rating thing. Pretty weak. Heck, sometimes we don't even know how to put gear in them so they get bolted:)

People asked for a good bouldering cave and they got it. And, that attracted a lot of boulders that used to not be up there.

The crack system would be easy to install and would only take one rope, out of a wall that very rarely gets used. With the system pictured in the original post, you could train a variety of sizes with just one rope.

Chris Prewitt wrote:Heck, sometimes we don't even know how to put gear in them so they get bolted:)

haha, yeah that seems to happen a lot around here. to be fair, usually this only happens to wacky lemmon-style cracks that could only go safely half on gear anyway.

it is true that people ask for a lot of things from their local gym, and obviously not every request can be fulfilled. however, as eric points out, people have requested things over the years that have resulted in a mutual benefit for both the owner and the customers, and a crack rack would be very easy (pronounced "cheap") to install, would take only one rope, and would satisfy just about any size crack one would want to train for.

Don't get me wrong guys, I love crack as much as the next guy. It would be really cool to see them provide a service to their customers that way. A gym should try to not only take care of helping train for the local stuff, but also help those who want to venture outside of SoAZ.
Eric- hopefully you had a good time on Moonlight anyway. Were you trying it free?

I can think of the exact time that I was talking to a Rocks and Ropes Instructor ( I won't say who) and he laughed about my story of me seeing a crack system in a gym in Oregon. I said why not our gym? and he said, "because it's the same thing everytime, the person climbs on it once and then it never gets touched again". He spoke very bluntly like it was something that he already knew over and over again. The last thing he asked me was "you ever see how many people climb the crack on the boulder", but before I could think of anything he erupted in laughter and said "nobody". Of course that's just his opinion and he's not the owner after all. I think somebody should get some info together on this kind of system, benefits and costs, and ask some questions and who knows you might just get what you need. And it benefits everybody in the long run. Or you could get the response that I got.

I used to climb at R&R with a bunch of summit hutters a few years ago and recall how we marveled at all those new flatscreen TV's and yet they laughed at our suggestions for a crack or other gym up grades. Hope they pull their heads out of the sand...

Ryan F. wrote:The last thing he asked me was "you ever see how many people climb the crack on the boulder", but before I could think of anything he erupted in laughter and said "nobody". Of course that's just his opinion and he's not the owner after all. I think somebody should get some info together on this kind of system, benefits and costs, and ask some questions and who knows you might just get what you need. And it benefits everybody in the long run. Or you could get the response that I got.

to respond to what the R&R instructor said about the crack on the boulder, i get on it almost every single time i am there, along with the 2 cracks on the other side, and i frequently see people looking at it and putting their hands in it and shaking their heads. many people attempt to climb the crack but rarely get more than a foot or 2 off the ground because the crack is so difficult and downright painful. one experience with that thing is enough for most people. you can't learn to crack climb on a 5.11 crack. you need to start out on 5.7 or 5.8 cracks and work your way up...which is of course impossible in tucson.

as for costs and benefits, i can gather the information about the costs, but for the benefits i would need a healthy display of support from the tucson climbing community, as that is exactly the benefit--more and happier gym patrons.

Let me know what I can do to help.

I know I'm outta my element here (we have good basalt cracks 15 minutes from home here) but have you seen the gym splitters at Momentum Gym in Sandy, UT? A system like that looks pretty nice and very climbable compared to the painful gym cracks I've experienced.
We have a 36 foot hands/off-hands crack at the gym in town here and it rarely gets climbed. Possibly because it's off-hands and flaring in many spots and also a bit overly painful. (Cracks often do hurt). The fact that it rarely does get climbed here leads me to believe that indoor cracks aren't really very popular so I can see why a gym owner would be hesitant to invest in it.