It’s Friday in Baton Rouge, and to a group of local rock-climbers, that usually means the start of a weekend road trip focused solely on climbing.
“We camp, wake up and eat, and then go climb literally all day,” Paul Knox, a local climber, tells 225 in a feature from the October issue. “We climb until we are super-tired then go back to camp and eat food and hang out. Then we go to sleep and do it again.”
For a typical group of rock-climbers, Knox’s weekend summation is pretty normal. But south Louisiana climbers are anything but typical.
There aren’t any rock formations to climb outdoors near Baton Rouge—or even in Louisiana, for that matter. So climbers here build their skills by practicing indoors at one of the three gyms with climbing facilities in Slidell, Lafayette and New Orleans, or in Baton Rouge at a rock tower maintained by BREC. Another small climbing gym, located in the LSU University Recreation Complex, closed in December 2014 for renovations and will reopen in 2016.
When climbers want to put the skills they’ve gained indoors to the test, they hit the road in search of real rock faces to scale.
“There probably aren’t other people willing to drive eight hours to climb for two days,” Knox says. “But when you live in Baton Rouge and (traveling) is the only opportunity, you’ll take any opportunity to go climb.”
Sometimes that means driving all day Friday, climbing on Saturday and driving back on Sunday.
But the long drive is worth it to spend even a day away from the flat swamplands in a place where you can put hand to rock. The experience couldn’t be more different than climbing indoors, Knox says.
“I was really scared when I went outside the first time,” he says. “It was way taller than anything I had climbed. It’s kind of shocking.”
The climbing-addicted groups of up to 30 locals that set out on these trips range from pre-teens to adults pushing 50. They roll out to destinations like Alabama, Tennessee or Texas for barely two days of climbing, and come Sunday, it’s back home to get ready for school or the daily 9-to-5.
Read the full feature, which includes a list of where to climb near Baton Rouge and a list of road-trip worthy destinations outside the region and state. Send your comments to editor@225batonrouge.com.
