In this blog series Tuomo Lankinen shares his thoughts on itinerary planning. Tuomo is the owner of the BoulderSaimaa climbing center and the route leader.
We like to talk about it escalation issues instead of routes. A problem is interesting, sometimes impossible, beautiful and inviting, and it teaches the climber how to solve a new difficulty. A problem is addictive, it sometimes enters your dreams and beckons you, again and again.
Our goal is to create a space in which climbers of different levels, from beginners to experienced climbers, have fun and learn new things about climbing and themselves. Here we present the main principles of setting up BoulderSaimaa routes:
- Quality
- Security
- Variety
- Equality
- Freshness
Quality
Climbing is the most important service of the climbing center; Such good climbing is everything. Invest in quality is a conscious choice, which comes with the cost of reducing the number of routes. Better, more versatile problems generally take longer to create, and they take up more space, with their large, modern wedges.
The number of interesting, addictive and educational problems offered to each visitor is more important to us than mere quantity.
Security
Of course, the route planner also has a great responsibility in this regard. security climbing. When troubleshooting, we carefully consider fall directions, grip types, and other factors affecting climbing safety.
Sometimes, for security reasons, you have to dedicate an entire sector to a single problem. For example, to complete the slab balancing challenge, it is essential that there are no holds on the path that could cause injury by falling on them.
Equality
To us, equality means that all customers have the opportunity to benefit from high-quality issues, regardless of their skill level, age, size, etc.
The system that drives our routing is based on a standard distribution. The easiest problems are the most numerous, as they are suitable for most climbers. A significant proportion of BoulderSaimaa’s climbers are beginners and children, and we want to invest in allowing them to climb good problems as well.
Height sometimes has a greater, sometimes lesser impact on the difficulty of the problem. We do our best so that the problems can also be climbed by smaller climbers, but this is not always possible.
Large grips and volumes are increasingly common to equalize height differences and are therefore widely used in competition. For the same reason, their popularity has increased under normal use in climbing gyms. To even out height differences, we also often use “extra” holds that taller climbers may not need, but shorter climbers generally find useful.
Freshness
We invest to refresh our problems! We reinvent all routes and sectors every six weeks or less. New challenges refresh the ideas and activities of climbers and route planners!
For climbers, the problems must be new. When they are new, their “use value” is high, but the longer they hang on the wall, the quicker they are forgotten, with the exception of a few classic routes and expensive projects. New climbing opportunities, that’s what indoor climbing is all about!
Of course, freshness also means new climbing holds and volumes, which we order on average twice a year.