New Outdoor Action Climbing Wall
Climbing at Princeton University is alive and well. For more than two decades, the OA climbing wall has been the home and the focal point for climbing at Princeton. Thousands of Princeton students, faculty, and staff have discovered the joy of climbing for the first time or expanded their skills by being a part of this special tightknit community.
Twenty-four years after a group of dedicated Princeton students built the very first climbing wall in a corner of the old Armory building, the Outdoor Action program is pleased to announce that Princeton will be building a new state-of-the-art climbing wall at the new football stadium. This next chapter promises to take climbing to a whole new level. The new wall designed and built by Entre Prise will be a fantastic resource. Overhangs, roofs, bulges, slabs and cracks will entertain and training a whole new generation of Princetonians.
The very first section of the wall built in 1983 was a classic wooden vertical structure. There were no commercially available climbing holds at the time so we used wooden holds, machined holds out of aluminum, and glued on rocks that had been cut in half with the diamond saw at the geology lab. A new overhanging section designed by famed Gunks climber Mike Freeman was added in 1989 and a portion of the original wall was rebuilt in 1997.
The new Climbing Wall was built in September 2007 by Entre Prises, one of the premiere climbing wall design companies in the world. The new Wall is 32 feet tall and 66 feet across and incorporate numerous climbing features including overhangs, a roof, cracks and a slab.