Welcome to the Cave

After several weeks of construction, the infamous bouldering cave in the Student Recreation Center is finally up and running once again.

The bouldering cave under the stairwell can be compared to a hidden climbing gem, as it is unknown by a multitude of students attending West Virginia University. Although, the cave acts as a sanctuary to many of the climbers here at WVU.

The cave’s routes are redesigned frequently by the climbing wall’s route-setting team and can range anywhere from an easy-breezy V0 to a gut-wrenching, destroy-your-fingertips V7, welcoming climbers at every skill level. The cave currently contains over 200 interchangeable holds.

With it’s new renovations, the cave now features several new, unique holds and a set of color-changing lights that wrap around the inside border, creating a funky and inviting atmosphere. Several climbers spend each day mastering routes within the cave, while other climbers use the cave to build strength and endurance. Despite how they spend their time in the cave, several members within the climbing community at WVU have long been anticipating the caves return and are excited to start projecting fresh routes.

Although the unveiling of the new wall was much anticipated, the journey to get where it is today was long and harrowing.

“The construction of the cave is unnecessarily complicated,” said Doug Tompkins. Tompkins is currently a junior at WVU and is on the wall’s route-setting team. Tompkins has been a route setter for the past two years.

“The cave is held up by a steel support frame, but the supports are not aligned with each other. This makes putting the panels back on much more difficult since we have no guide or reference to use. This semester the whole cave probably took 2 weeks to put back up, but that was because we had to redo our progress twice,” continued Tompkins.

With the cave’s new features, the climbing wall staff hopes to satisfy climbers who are hungry for new and challenging routes, as well as attract new people to join the growing community of climbers at WVU.

To learn more about WVU’s climbing wall, visit https://adventureclimbing.wvu.edu/.

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