The Kicks of the Spidermen

There's a new campus fad that's got students at Brown University climbing the walls--literally.

It's called bouldering, and it's replacing twice-weekly jaunts to Steve's for ice cream as the most popular college tension-reliever.

Bouldering is a variety of rockclimbing, usually done on local architecture. A "dry-weather sport," bouldering can be done almost anywhere--and is! At Brown, the most frequent targets of bouldering are campus buildings, a large percentage of which have already been conquered.

The day-and-midnight marauders say that the abundance of chalk-stained walls around campus attests to the fact that the sport has caught on and happens "all over, all the time." (Boulderers use chalk, which dries the fingertips, to ease their aerial ascent.)

Those who do it, whether they climb three feet or three hundred feet off the ground, say the new 'sport' is challenging, fun and "an end in itself."

Boulderers say they use no equipment, save maybe a rope when climbing extremely tall buildings. However, so far, there have been no bouldering-related injuries.

Brown security services director John Krupevich says that the only two incidents he knows of occurred after the Brown Daily Herald ran an article on Bouldering. Aside from that, he says, he can not confirm that bouldering even exists. Krupevich said however "there is a rumor about a student throwing a grappling hook out his window to climb the two stories to the roof."