When no one wanted to be officers of the University of Idaho Climbing Club, Kevin Townsley and Andrew Harmon became the president and vice president of the club.
“I started it this year,” said Townsley, a sophomore double majoring in geology and sociology. “Nobody was doing this and I love this team and I want to see it keep going.”
After his father took him rock climbing when he was 7- years-old, he got really into it, Townsley said. When Townsley attended middle school and high school, he joined climbing teams in Boise. After he moved to Moscow in 2012, he joined the UI Climbing Club.
“It has been really fun, really rewarding — a little frustrating sometimes but mostly rewarding,” Townsley said.
Harmon, a junior studying biology, got started climbing after his visit to Moscow campus on Vandal Friday in March 2011. He said he really liked it and decided to improve his skills by joining the club in his sophomore year.
The UI Climbing Club hosted the Palouse Climbing Festival last Friday at the climbing wall in the Student Recreation Center. The club members and a professional setter rearranged over 100 routes to make the competition fair for non-UI students.
“They take every route off the wall, because I knew every route in here five days ago,” Harmon said. “So I would have the advantage over everybody who came from other schools, because I understand how to do the routes.” UI is a part of Northwest Collegiate Climbing Circuit, also called NC3. UI has officially participated in the competition for about 12 years, though since the ‘80s UI students participated in competition outside the university.
There are seven universities in NC3 including UI, Eastern Washington University, Western Washington University, Oregon State University, Central Washington University, University of Washington and Whitman College.
“We have like seven competitions,” Townsley said. “We are hosting this one and we’ve gone to competitions at like Eastern Washington, Western Washington OSU. (We) just went two weekends ago. Now we are putting on the whole thing and everybody else comes here.”
Townsley took home fourth place, in the competition last year. He said people don’t need to be experts in climbing to compete, because the judges measure the abilities.
“You should come out and climb,” Townsley said. “Just come to the gym and try climbing because it’s awesome. It’s the No.1 thing in my life.”
