Powell couple builds climbing gym in garage
Powell couple builds climbing gym in garage
By Mark Davis
Powell Tribune
Via Wyoming News Exchange
POWELL — Terry O’Neill’s priorities seemed to be that of a stereotypical male as he and his bride, Jacy, shopped for a house in Powell.
“What do you want in a house, Terry? A big garage,” he said, answering his own question as he peered out from the structure’s oversized door.
The house, in a midtown neighborhood on Day Street, needed work when the O’Neills bought it. There was a dead tree in front that needed to come down and a replacement to be planted. And there was a lot of painting, remodeling and clean-up. But the couple, like most families buying their first home, had a long list of to dos. At the top: the huge detached garage with 12-foot ceilings had to be transformed into a private climbing gym.
It might be the best place to climb in Powell — perhaps surpassing the seemingly impressive climbing wall in Northwest College’s Cabre Gym.
“I checked it out,” Terry said of NWC’s wall. “But seeing it, I knew it wasn’t going to be challenging enough for what we needed.”
Inside their garage, the O’Neills constructed new walls at varying angles. They then installed hundreds of climbing holds — essentially colorful, roughly molded resin bumps attached to the wall. The construction project drew a crowd. Neighbors would stop and gawk as the couple worked through the unique project.
For flooring, they collected old pillow-top mattresses. But you still feel the concrete when you fall from the highest holds, Terry warned.
“Watch for all the holes,” Jacy cautioned.
Only after the climbing walls were finished did they cut down that giant silver leaf poplar, plant a sapling and paint the house sky blue. Despite all the hard work, the garage doesn’t see a lot of action during the summer. Every free moment of the short northern Wyoming summer is spent in the mountains climbing or traveling around the globe to top climbing locations.
Once winter hits, the garage is once again a daily destination for the couple and select friends — most useful when avoiding the inherent risks of climbing iced over waterfalls and the accompanying “screaming barfies.”
“The screaming barfies is when your hands go numb from holding on to the ice axes and not having enough insulation or circulation. Then, after you climb your pitch, you thaw them out by getting the blood flowing, and it’s like you hurt so bad, you feel like you want to scream and barf at the same time,” Terry explained.
The home climbing gym serves to keep the couple in shape when the weather keeps them from their passion. And for rock climbing, there is no better place than Park County, according to the O’Neills.
“It turns out that the climbing up here is some of the best that I’ve ever climbed. There’s very few people, lots of rock and lots of potential for new routes — almost more than there is currently developed,” Terry said. “So it’s kind of opposite than what we’re used to.”
The couple has climbed in the internationally famous Ten Sleep area, but prefer the isolation and unexplored areas of the Absaroka Range. Even at the Island, a convenient climbing area in the Lower Shoshone near the Buffalo Bill Dam with its own parking lot, there’s rarely a crowd. The climbing community in Park County is slowly growing, according to Terry. He’s conflicted.
“I want to share it with everyone,” he said, “but, at the same time, one of our favorite things about this area is that there’s not very many climbers and climbing isn’t a very popular sport here.”
The worry isn’t so much for locals to take up climbing, rather visitors streaming to the area once the quality climbing is discovered. The O’Neills have been on the other side of the argument, traveling to South Africa, Vietnam and Thailand to experience the world’s best climbing.
Ten Sleep is ranked among the best. And if the Absaroka Range was discovered by the climbing culture, they’d find it to be a similar quality, Terry said.
Mike and Megan Fallon, of Billings, have been coming to the lower Shoshone area for more than a decade, despite having several choices in the area.
“Eight times out of 10 we come here. The area itself is extremely accessible. We can bring the kitchen sink,” Mike said, pointing to the gear necessary to keep a baby happy. “But even prior to [baby] Emma being in our lives we came to the lower canyon a ton. The rock quality is awesome and there’s a really good range of grades.”
Megan hopes Emma will be climbing soon, but first she needs to learn to walk.
Along with their own culture, climbers have their own lexicon.
Trying to follow is similar to learning a new language combined with some confusing math problems. Every path up the cliff has an unique name. Describing maneuvers often results in word combinations unfamiliar to those who like to keep their feet securely planted on terra firma.
Terry and Jacy approach the sport from opposite ends of the spectrum. Terry is a chemical engineer with a second degree in psychology.
“My engineering mind just wants to figure out how to manage risk,” he said. “You are executing a predetermined sequence. You already have it planned out, you know where your hands and your feet are gonna go in sequence.”
Jacy has a degree in fine art. She unapologetically says that, “I’m wrong a lot.”
Yet, on the rocks, both move confidently, making the sport look easy. Of course, it isn’t. Both have chiseled bodies and vice grip-like handshakes. While their approaches are somewhat different — think aesthetic versus empiric — both are climbing at about the same level (working on 5.13s for those who track climbing difficulty ratings, known as the Yosemite Decimal System) and have been for most of their adult lives.
Climbing brought them together, meeting in the gym at Western Colorado University.
Through all the new words and phrases encountered in a laze of climbers, one sentence is easy to understand, though it required a double-take before the impact hit home: “Falling and climbing are the same sport,” Terry said.
Top climbers continue to push for challenges.
When they fail, which can be often, they fall. Controlling the fall is the trick. Jacy has found herself upside-down, hanging high above the safety of flat land. Yet, her worst injury has been “sore fingers.”
Terry hasn’t been as lucky. Early in his climbing career, in a rush to impress a mentor, he fell while “trad” climbing. The only type of climbing riskier than trad, or traditional climbing, is free climbing, which is sans the support of a rope and harness. In trad climbing, the rope is attached to an anchor, or tricam, that has been temporarily placed in a crack or catch in the rock.
“So if you’re climbing the rock, and you’re super pumped out, and you’re trying to get a piece in, but it’s not quite the right size, like, it can get pretty hectic,” Terry said.
He fell and the first three tricams failed to hold. Terry hit a ledge about 30-feet from where he fell. Then he fell an additional 15-feet. He didn’t have any broken bones, just bruises and contusions. Terry thought he’d be OK until he passed out on the way home and woke up blind — possibly from hitting the back of his head where the optic lobe resides. The condition lasted for about 10 to 15 minutes.
Since then, the couple considers their relative safety of utmost importance.
“If you fall weird, you can definitely, you know, hit some things and tweak and sprain some things. But overall, you’re gonna be OK,” Terry said.
“If you go up into like the Alpine or bigger mountain stuff or big walls, the no fall zones become somewhat more prevalent. They do exist and it’s important to recognize where they are,” he said. “But most of the time, you’re going to be OK.”
The O’Neills always wear helmets, especially locally, where climbing is still somewhat in its infancy and loose rocks have yet to be unseated by crowds of climbers. It’s not exactly effective advertisement for the growing sport. But then again, that works to their advantage.