Moving Up in The World

By J.D. Reed

When they're not hitting the books, most college kids like to hang out. Now some of them are hanging out by hanging on -- to rocks. On a growing number of campuses from Berkeley to Princeton, the latest sport craze is indoor climbing walls, structures of concrete and stone that replicate sheer mountain faces. Fans say that climbing the walls, armed with no special equipment, offers a new high in concentration, exertion (and sheer terror) that leaves jogging and aerobic dance flat-footed.

The nation's largest such facility opened this week at Cornell University. Measuring 30 ft. high and 160 ft. wide, the $160,000 wall utilizes concrete blocks and specially designed pieces of real rock as hand- and footholds. For safety's sake, climbers wear helmets, are attached to emergency lines and work in teams. One partner on the ground mans his buddy's belaying line. In some places on the wall it is necessary to press one's face against the rock and inch upward clinging perilously to golf ball-size projections and toe-pinching crannies. Such realistic action thrills ascension aficionados. Says Ken Gerow, a Cornell graduate student who likes to scale real mountains when he has the chance: "Nothing trains you better for climbing than climbing."

Popularized in France in the mid-1980s, the indoor version of the sport is catching on in the U.S., both on campus and off. Climbing walls at health clubs in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colo., are doing landslide business. Seattle's Vertical Club, the U.S.'s first rock gym, built in 1987, now has some 400 members who pay $225 a year to scale its heights. The reason for success, according to Chris Grover, president of Entre Prises, the U.S. affiliate of a French wall manufacturer, is the result of removing real climbing's dangers. "Indoor cliffs appeal a lot more to people than the macho attitude of 'Let's see how close we can get to killing ourselves and still be able to talk about it in the bars afterward.' "

Hard-core climbing buffs may soon be able to approximate such death-defying thrills indoors. In Chicago, a new cliff will soar a breathtaking eight stories from base to summit, and the French are experimenting with ever more realistic simulations of the rugged outdoors, complete with frozen indoor waterfalls.

With reporting by Linda Williams/New York