What is the Grasshopper Board?
March 4, 2021
Written by Kylie Tidmore, LaHaye Rock Wall Manager
The LaHaye Rock Wall is a special place that hosts a unique, eclectic community who comes together to solve puzzles that flex their minds and bodies. Through the variety of competitions, challenges, and new sets the LaHaye Rock Wall has to offer, strangers have become unified friends as they work through problems and encourage others in their pursuits. The newly installed Grasshopper Board is a really neat training technology tool that can help advance anyone’s climbing skills—but it’s also much more than that. The Grasshopper Board is the newest thing at the wall that the community can use to come together.
So, What is it?
The Grasshopper Board features a variety of holds and uses an app to light up different routes. The app is super easy to navigate and houses a variety of problems at all difficulty levels, making it easy for climbers of every skill level to get involved.
Through the app, users have the opportunity to light up the board with any of the problems listed. One of the coolest features is the ability to create your own problems for the board. You simply select the holds you want and specify which are for feet only, start holds, and finish holds. Which, let me say, is WAY easier than dragging out ladders to set on any of the other walls we have!
Create Your Own Routes
In my almost three years working at the LaHaye Rock Wall, setting has consistently been one of my favorite parts of the job (despite the aforementioned dragging out of ladders). This part of the job has challenged me as a climber myself and as a part of the community—we, as setters, have the desire to create things other people would rally around as well.
But now, through the Grasshopper Board, everyone gets to be a setter! It has been so cool to see climbers show their friends their new problems and it has been inspiring, as an employee, to see people with no setting experience use their creativity to create some super cool problems! The app does not only display sets created by the Liberty community; it also provides sets created by climbers around the world. Meaning, there is nearly an endless supply of boulder problems! This allows the Liberty community to climb sets by people like Josh Larsen, an Olympic Route Setter, and Nathaniel Coleman, an American professional climber, from the comfort of the gym they know and love.
The Grasshopper board is incredibly well done and has given the rock wall at LaHaye Recreation & Fitness Center a new and exciting edge. The board is open to all and we encourage you to give it a shot! Make a reservation here to try it for yourself.