the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

TEXT: JOSH LOWELL EVEN IF YOU LIVE IN THE MIDDLE OF HELLS KITCHEN, TODAY'S TOP ROCK CLIMBING SPOTS ARE JUST A STONE'S THROW AWAY. The path to the top of the climbing world was, until recently, one of sacrifice. Forget about a job, a home or a relationship. Sell everything for gas money, stock up on Ramen noodles and hit the road. Follow the seasons from cliff to cliff, climb all day and shiver all night in a mildewed-out tent. Keep it up for a few years and you might start to get good. But times have changed. While the romance of the road still lures nomadic types, the boom in indoor climbing has made it possible to both climb and have a life. With gyms popping up in every city, climbing is becoming a legitimate urban pursuit. Professionals and novices alike are taking to new climbing experiences on their basement bouldering walls or around the town. Climbing is the perfect compliment to the urban lifestyle. The relentless pursuit of personal achievement that drives urban dwellers carries over perfectly to a sport that demands nothing more than pushing one's own limits. But it is also the perfect antidote. The near-hypnotic state achieved during a difficult climb erases all the stresses and distractions of metropolitan madness. It's appreciation of this intense focus that hooks lifelong climbing devotees. Today, America's number-one-ranked competition climber is Vadim Vinokur, a 22-year-old New York City graduate student. His day begins with two hours of fingertip pull-ups on a plywood training board mounted in his Brooklyn apartment. After classes, he takes a five-minute subway ride to the most challenging climbing area on the east coast: a 55-foot high fiberglass "cliff" inside The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, a massive gym complex that juts into the Hudson River on Manhattan's lower West side. Inside the gym, he explains, the weather's always good and the sun never sets, which makes training possible year-round and well into the night. The hand holds are shaped for comfort, so climbers end their sessions when their muscles fatigue, not when their skin tears on rock. And unlike the permanent features of a natural rock face, the holds on an indoor wall can be added, removed and manipulated to create routes with an infinite range of styles and difficulties. The controlled environment of indoor climbing also opens the sp'ort to a whole new population of urbanites. "Climbers aren't just a bunch of white boys driving arouna in camper vans anymore, " says Ivan Greene, manager of the Sports Center climbing wall. "On any given night in the gym you'll see almost 50 percent women, plus climbers of every age and color. It wasn't like that a few years ago." At the Sports Center wall, lifelong climbing bums swap belays with writers, filmmakers, inventors, musicia ns, painters, business types, dancers, photographers, internet designers and fashion mavens. With such a broad community of creative people concentrated around their shared love of the sport, a unique urban climbing culture is beginning to emerge. The soundtrack is hip-hop and the lingo is tinged by a streetwise edge. Greene, 28, has spent the past ten years pursuing his climbing passion. Bitten by the bug as a teenager, he left his art studies in New York City and moved upstate to climb full time. Working as a guide just enough to keep his habit going, Greene paid his dues, made the obligatory west coast and European pilgrimages, and rose into the upper echelons of American climbing. But as a city kid with a hypercreative mind and a need for constant action, he was never satisfied with the culture-deprivation of what he calls the "old-school climbing lifestyle." "Now I can climb five days a week, have a full-time job, and sti ll be in on the urban scene," Greene says. "I can be a climber and live in Soho." While indoor gyms are certainly a blessing, actual rock is what makes climbing, well, climbing. There's something inherently more compelling about climbing a surface that was not specifically designed to be climbed. Even hard-core gym-bred city slickers eventually tend to hear the call of the wild, but while their physical skills may be top-notch before ever laying hand on rock, their knowledge of the technical procedures required for safe outdoor climbing is often virtually nil. At a real cliff, the anchors and ropes aren't pre-placed, no instructors are on patrol and the climber must be prepared for objective hazards like rockfall, storms and darkness. Formal instruction from a professional guide is the only way to safely make the transition from indoor to outdoor climbing. But for some, the indoor world of climbing is the ultimate experience. Last year, the Sports Center

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