Friday glee is dreaming of real rocks for the new year

[rydra_wong]

The Friday post of glee is where you get to tell us about your climbing-related happiness this week.

It can be a new achievement or adventure, or just that you climbed and had fun; it can be that your favourite climbing wall is expanding or that you bought new rock shoes or that you found a cool ice-climbing vid on YouTube. No glee is too small -- or too big. Members are encouraged to cheer each other on and share the squee.

N.B. Please feel free to post your glee on any day of the week; the Friday glee is just to get the ball rolling.

To enhance this week's glee: legendary comp climber Jain Kim turns out to be quite strong on real rock too.

Help keep a rock gym in very flat Florida alive!

[wpadmirer]

In Florida we have no natural rock to climb. You have to travel at least four to five hours to get to natural rock that can be climbed.

So we rely heavily on rock gyms to be able to climb regularly. I live in Gainesville, FL, which is a small town built on top of limestone that has a river flowing beneath it.

Because of the unusual nature of our ground, foundations of building often begin to drop/crack/become generally unstable.

This has happened to our rock gym. The nearest place to climb without our gym (and not driving out of state to find real rock) is a rock gym that is 2 1/2 hours away. So for most of us, the closing of our gym means no climbing to be had at all.

So the gym has started a GoFundMe campaign to try to help raise money to fix the foundation of the building so that we can all go back to climbing.

This is the site, https://www.gofundme.com/zjfvbw64. If you would like to help us, please do! We appreciate it very much.

We're small, but we also have one of the few USA Climbing sanctioned bouldering competitions to be had in the Southeast - Boulderpalooza! We have a youth team that is very active, and a lively climbing community.

Thank you!