Fun Haver Training

By: Steph Davis

By KAVU

June 9^th, 2020

Busy livin: Backyard Paradise!

About 20 years ago, a good friend of mine helped me build a backyard climbing wall. It was ultra low budget, and started off with a couple old mattresses under it for pads. It’s an awesome climbing wall, with one side at 45 degrees and one side at 30 degrees. Each wall is 12 feet long and 12 feet high (but the steepness means you aren’t 12 feet up at the top). Over time, we made a retaining wall with railroad ties and wheelbarrowed in many tons of gravel to build the landing area higher toward the back. No one ever really expected this wall to last so long, and in fact, we built it directly on dirt (in retrospect, a shallow concrete footer, or just a row of bricks under it would have been a good investment), but since it has corrugated metal protecting the back from weather, and since this is Moab, it’s still holding steady!

Upgrade

Technology has really come up since we built my wall, and I’ve been really wanting a Moonboard in the last couple of years. Moab has just about everything, except for a climbing gym and steep, fitness style climbing. So it’s always a little tough to really train for climbing, but I can’t really imagine living anywhere else.

At the end of last year, I finally made the decision to go really big with the outdoor climbing gym, and I ordered a Treadwall (a climbing wall that continuously rotates so you can climb….forever)......

......and also a Grasshopper frame and a Moonboard—the frame makes it so you can adjust the angle of the Moonboard, because there are 2 angles that are used, 25 degrees and 40 degrees. And sadly, both of those angles are exactly 5 degrees off from my climbing wall, because at first I thought I could just turn that into 2 side-by-side Moonboards, but it was not to be;-(

So the old wall gets to stay too, and the yard is becoming a full-on climbing gym.

Somewhat miraculously, I already had a concrete slab in one corner of my yard that would be the perfect size and location for the Treadwall (which weighs over 1000 pounds!).

For the Moonboard, we’d need to construct a pretty substantial post-and-beam frame with a serious concrete footer. I was hoping to get that done in January or February, but we had a cold winter and the ground was too frozen to dig, or pour cement. Things got pretty crazy in March, and Ian and I finally got to digging holes for the big beams I had to special order, but then the next thing I knew, the Treadwall was being delivered to my driveway in a huge, thousand-pound pallet. After waiting for 3 months, it was all happening at once!

Luckily we have plenty of time for projects at the moment, so in a way it all worked out pretty well.

Ian and I spent about 4 days (not all at once, but it was definitely a project!) carrying the Treadwall pieces to the backyard and building it. It’s incredibly well made and comes with very thorough directions, and was actually a pretty fun construction project!

The wall operates a lot like a garage door, and you can change the angle of the wall with cranks (you can also get a push button option, but I like the simplicity of hand cranks, especially with it living outside) and you can also change the rate of speed at which the wall will rotate as you climb.

This thing is going to be a true game changer, because there simply is no long, steep endurance or power-endurance style climbing in Moab. Suddenly you can get pumped climbing in Moab…in my backyard!

But alas, it’s not yet time to settle in and enjoy the Treadwall, because we need to get this Moonboard project up too…. We ended up getting the posts in and the cement footer framed and poured in one big day, and this is the complete opposite of my old wall in terms of stability. But based on how the old wall is doing, this thing will probably last for a thousand years, more or less. The posts are 16 foot 6x6s, set 4 feet deep in cement, which is joined directly to the footer, which is 30 inches deep and a foot wide. 24 bags of cement, at 80 pounds a bag, and this thing is built for the duration.