These past few weeks have been consuming my mind with all the questions that when answered, will define my design for Karp. In doing background research, I have been inquiring as to the life span of climbing ropes in different environments. While the area of gym climbing requires different behavior and equipment, different care for the equipment, different amount of use and therefore lifespan, and different storage, I just can't resist Brooklyn Boulders. So I headed there and chatted with some of the guys that do route setting, the facilities manager, and the general manager, to find out about their ropes. It turns out that ropes have a very short life span in BKB, which isn't surprising if you go in there and see how it is constantly full of happy and hard working climbers and boulderers. This trip brought on a very cool ending. In discussing these dead ropes, I was led back to the route setters storage, where there were shelves stacked with 30 gallon storage bins. Many thanks to BKB, I now have a very new but related design problem to look at. With all these excess ropes, there are huge possibilities for upcycling!
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