After years of advocating for a new wall, the SIU climbing club finally had their wishes granted.

Located in the Recreation Center, the 34-year-old climbing wall was taken apart. Construction began Tuesday night, and as of now, the new climbing wall is set to be open for public use come the beginning of next semester.

Mitch Belsley, the graduate assistant of Outdoor Pursuits studying natural resource management and recreation ecology from Peoria, said the climbing community has continued to voice a need for an update in the wall for years.

One of those community members is Dave Hug, president of the SIU climbing club, who said the current wall is completely outdated, and has been in great need of a makeover for some time.

“It was the very first wall ever built on a college campus and the fifth wall ever built in the country. It’s an absolute dinosaur,” he said.

Hug said the present wall is dilapidated and has an abundance of problems, including the absurd amount of dead spots. Dead spots are where a climber cannot mount to any climbing holds because the hardware on the backside of the wall has failed, and as of now, there is zero access to the backside of the wall.

The new design, however, will have full access to the back of the wall, and it will be composed of more than 1,000 holds. It will consist of a steel-reinforced frame and new plywood in order to keep it safe and stable.

Hug said in-depth research was done before he personally created the blueprint last spring, which was modified slightly then built by campus engineers and union carpenters.

“The way that they’re putting it up is going to make it as strong as can be, and I really don’t see any way to make it any stronger. They’re going to do a very professional job on it,” he said.

Belsley said they had their initial meeting with the engineers in January, who at the time were fairly busy, and did not get the final go- ahead until the beginning of this semester.

“We have been talking with the engineers, we have been bouncing ideas back and forth I would say roughly for about a year now,” he said. “But actively designing and purchasing of the stuff probably started in August.”

Hug said they are getting $10,000 of new equipment, which includes new ropes, harnesses, shoes, hardware, auto belays and brand new holds. The project will take just two weeks, and the most difficult part will be setting the routes.

“The hardest job is going to be putting the climbing routes up,” Hug said. “It’s going to be color coded, it’s going to be flashy, it’s going to pop.”

Climbing routes are essentially paths a climber will take to reach the top of a wall, set by where the holds are designed to be.

Troy Vaughn, director of Recreational Sports and Services at the Recreation Center, said the Outdoor Pursuits climbing staff would be training over winter break to better understand the new alterations and up to date sections of the wall.

“This is going to be new for them too, because we are going to have different variations of how difficult portions of the wall will be,” Vaughn said. “So there will be a beginner’s route, an intermediate route and then an advanced route.”

All the holds for the new wall were purchased through the local company, Climb So iLL.

“They got a lot of the brand new really exciting holds, stuff like the freshest stuff on the market,” said Climb So iLL Marketing and Press Inquirer Daniel Chancellor. “They bought a lot of bigger holds which are a little more expensive, so they definitely invested into having a good product.”

About 16 months ago, Daniel and his brother David Chancellor opened Climb So iLL, a product company and climbing gym in St. Louis. After going through the entrepreneurship program at SIU in 2005, Daniel said he is thrilled to be providing for the wall where their brand originated.

“We started the products company on the porch of our rental house on Maple street,” Chancellor said. “The So iLL name obviously came from southern Illinois and we kind of have a world wide brand now, so getting to do a project at home is really neat for us.”

Once complete, Hug hopes to open a realm of options for maintaining money in case renovations in the future are needed. He plans to do this by holding competitions, renting shoes, getting students certified in different techniques and teaching classes.

“The wall isn’t that good for teaching right now and when we get our new wall we’re going to have so many more possibilities,” Hug said. “We would put all the funds into hopefully some type of revolving account to where whenever we need more things we could use those funds to pay for them, so hence the wall would pay for itself.”

Belsley said along with teaching, the new wall is going to greatly benefit the university in recruiting and retaining students, as the Recreation Center can play a major factor into yearly student recruitment.

“Among the facilities within a rec center, consistently in studies across the nation, in the top three things within a rec center that draws people to that rec center is their climbing facility,” he said.

While the new wall can appeal to current and future Salukis, the old one has quite the history to it.

In 1980, southern Illinois climber Alan Carrier built the original wall as a design project for Professor Harold Grosowsky. With Carrier as one of his design students, Grosowsky said he would give him credit if he were to build a wall for the Recreation Center. Ironically, Adam Grosowsky, Harold’s son, was actually Carrier’s climbing partner in high school.

Carrier then hand-built and designed maple “V” shaped holds, because at the time, hold companies were yet to exist.

As stated in a Daily Egyptian article on April 3, 1986, “The wall consists of several dozen pieces of wood, about one inch thick, that have been sanded and finished then bolted into concrete so that it requires climbing techniques to scale the wall.”

Carrier budgeted the wall within $5,000. After creating the wall, he then became climbing club president.

Eric Ulner, an SIU alumnus and avid climber for 37 years, said he met Carrier through the climbing club at SIU where they were climbing partners. Ulner was then climbing club president in 1989 through 1992, when he and Carrier had already begun to build what is now the climbing community in southern Illinois.

“Dave Hug’s a friend of mine who runs the wall now, when he showed me the design of the new wall, it’s very similar to what I had drawn 23 years ago, so I had a little bit of a laugh out of that, because it took 23 years later for someone in the administration to finally modernize the wall,” Ulner said.

On May 13, 2013, the original designer and climbing pioneer of his time, Alan Carrier, passed away in his home in De Soto at the age of 53.

Alan’s son, Phillip Carrier, said he has early memories of climbing with his dad.

“Around when I was, you know 10 or so, we started going out every weekend,” Carrier said.

As climbing club president in 2009 and 2010, Phillip said the new wall has been a long time coming, and is a long overdue redesign.

“It’s finally happening,” Carrier said. “For the whole history of the climbing club we’ve been pushing to get a new wall.”

Belsley said in honor of Alan Carrier, Outdoor Pursuits will be giving Phillip the wooden V shaped holds his father once designed for the original wall, while also keeping one as memorabilia on the new one, whether it be in use or off to the side.

Currently, there is a plaque next to the wall as a memorial for Professor Grosowsky.

While keeping Grosowsky’s name, Ulner said he would be supportive of making a memorial for Carrier on the new wall, along with potentially renaming it.

“I think it would be appropriate for them to rename the wall, ‘The Harold Grosowsky Allen Carrier Memorial Wall,’ that would be cool,” Ulner said.

Ashley Bolin, a junior studying wildlife conservation who has been on the climbing club for three years, said this new wall is going to considerably benefit the climbing club and community.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time and I’m really happy about what they’re doing,” she said.

Vaughn invites all to come out and climb the new wall, and hopes students who have never experienced climbing give it a shot.

“We are going to have the best wall in all of southern Illinois,” Hug said.