BOUNTIFUL, Utah — A group of Utah youth ice climbers was celebrated Monday following their return from Europe, where they swept the podiums at an international competition, with two crowned world champions.
More than half of the USA Youth National Team trains at The Scratch Pad, a drytooling facility in Bountiful.
With sharp ice axes and crampons on their shoes, the champs ascended the location's plywood wall.
“It’s called competition ice climbing, a lot of it is dry tooling, ice climbing is inherently fairly easy, doesn’t get much deeper than vertical. So to make it hard to separate out the best of the best, we put it on plywood, you usually make it pretty steep, inverted... and you use very finess-y, very delicate stainless steel holds or sometimes plastic holds," explained climber Lex Border.
On the wall with the horizontal planks. Border’s objective is to get to the top as fast as possible.
“Instead of hanging on a hook on ice, this is meant to cause you to use a ton of body tension to kick in with your feet and core strength,” he explained.
That strength is used by Team USA athletes to compete in ice climbing and dry tooling competitions across the world.
“We just competed in Europe... and it was super exciting,” said climber Conner Bailey.
Bailey was one of the first to join the youth team at The Scratch Pad.
“That was my first time competing in a competition that big, so I was super excited for that," he said of the recent UIAA Ice Climbing Youth World Championships, where he left with some major hardware.
“I got first for lead in world championships, and I got second in speed,” Bailey said.
