Upper Limits Rock Gym, Bloomington, Illinois

Kate Ewing couldn’t stop to wipe the sweat out of her eyes. She was hanging by her fingertips on a vertical face nearly 65 feet above the ground.
No problem.

Ewing caught the rock-climbing bug on a mission trip to Morocco. Then a friend took her to the Upper Limits Rock Gym in Bloomington, Ill. – and she was hooked.
The gym, a converted grain silo, boasts some of the tallest climbs in the nation. The cylindrical inner walls, once buried in grain, are now spotted with multi-colored handholds.  

“I remember that first night – by the end of the night my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t even hold onto the wall,” she said. “I couldn’t grip the holds. It was like my mind wanted to keep climbing, but my body couldn’t.”

Since that day five years ago, she’s been back to the gym nearly 400 times.

“I just kind of kept climbing,” she said. “People come and go, but there seem to be the standard gym rats that are always there.

“The nice part about good climbers is the really good ones and the really passionate ones love to teach people how to climb. They’re really patient with you. They welcome you in.”

“Oh, the Wave,” Ewing said. “That’s actually pretty fun to climb.”

After gawking at the advanced climbers crawling all over the garage, visitors enter the office area. There, they can buy or rent equipment and staffers fit them with harnesses.

Cinched tightly into their new gear, climbers are ready.

Towering 65 feet high, each of the four climbing silos boasts a number of courses. Difficulty levels range from 5.6 to 5.12 (pronounced five-twelve). Some courses have a lot of large holds, but on others the holds are barely bigger than the screws that hold them into the walls – and are frighteningly sparse.

The space echoes with climbing partners calling to each other.

The gleeful cry, “Climb on!” is the most commonly heard phrase.

Father and son Sam and Michael Jung were one such pair. Sam had been to this gym before, but it was 15-year-old Michael’s first time at Upper Limits.
Preparing for a climb, each took one end of a rope that ran through a series of carabineers at the top of their chosen course. This setup is called a top-rope climb. Michael knotted his end into a figure-eight knot and ran it through his harness twice before tying more knots. Sam threaded his end of the rope through the belay device, which he attached to his harness in two places. Then they began the conversation that signals the start of any climb.

“On belay?” Michael asked his father.

“Belay on,” Sam responded.

“Climbing?” Michael asked.

“Climb on!”

At his father’s response, Michael leaped to his first hold on the wall. His experience became apparent as he zoomed up the course. Pulling the rope steadily through the belay device, Sam kept the line taut so his son wouldn’t fall far if he slipped.

Upper Limits staff members change the courses to keep climbers like the Jungs on their toes. Only the original course, the one that workers climbed for fun while building the gym, remains unchanged.

Once a person has mastered top-rope climbing, it’s time to learn how to lead.

Lead climbing courses don’t have a rope already waiting. A climber takes the rope up as he or she ascends, latching it into metal hooks along the way.

If a person falls, he or she will fall a lot farther than the typical 6-inch top-rope fall – likely slamming into the wall, as well.

“You’ve got to control your mind when you’re leading, because you can really freak yourself out,” Ewing said. “They say you should be climbing [level 5.9s and 5.10s] clean before you take the lead-climbing class.”

Lead climbers must know where their rope is in relation to their limbs at all times. If a lead climber misplaces a foot, that foot might catch the rope during a fall and flip the climber upside down, leaving the climber dangling helplessly. A lead-climbing class prepares people for the added danger.

“It was really exciting to go through the class,” Ewing said. “You have to take a couple of big falls in practice. You take a 5- to 7-foot fall, and then you take a 20-foot fall. The more you fall, the better you’re able to handle it. And then you’re falling all the time. You’re just like, ‘Woohoo, I’m falling.’”

Even with her obvious skill, the self-described gym rat doesn’t place herself in the most enthusiastic category of climbers.

“I’m certainly not a hard-core sleep-in-a-tent, hang-off-the-side-of-a-cliff climber,” Ewing said. “The really hard-core climbers, they climb in the gym just to keep in shape for outdoor climbing.”

However, many people enjoy the indoor experience Upper Limits offers just for what it is – and they’re getting a first-rate example of the world of rock climbing.

The Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel rate Upper Limits the No. 1 climbing gym in the world. It’s also one of only about half a dozen nationwide that occupy old grain elevators, manager Shawn Watson said.

But Watson said it is rarely the gym’s prestige that draws climbers. It’s the sport itself.  

“There’s always something different with rock climbing,” he said. “There’s always some problem solving involved. The path isn’t right in front of you. You have to figure it out. And indoor climbing is great as far as working on strength and endurance.”

Despite its renown, Upper Limits remains accessible to all. Even on a Saturday afternoon, most climbers had a silo all to themselves.

“I think they spread a lot through word of mouth,” said climber Kevin Moore of Urbana, Ill. “I’ve never seen them advertise.”

Yet the gym has been featured in Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune and on “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning.”
Certain circles in particular have caught on to the rock-climbing craze.

Wednesday is college night at Upper Limits, when students can climb for $8 instead of the usual $12, and it’s often packed.

Ewing, who is an elementary school teacher, said she enjoys the social opportunity of climbing.

“You’re standing around talking to the people you’re climbing with,” she said. “I climb with an English professor, a newspaper editor, a veterinary technician, a doctor, a construction worker, an accountant. It’s just amazing that all different walks of life come in, and that’s the bond that kind of holds us together.”

Although the gym’s staff insists there is no stereotypical climber, visitors to the gym all have one thing in common: They climb for the love of it, and they say Upper Limits is irreplaceable.

“I think about moving, and part of the reason I don’t want to move is I don’t want to move away from the gym,” Ewing said. “It would be really hard to find a gym as good as Upper Limits. It’s fun, it’s challenging. And then when you actually do it, you just feel like you’ve really accomplished something.”