What do you get when you combine a group of New Zealand’s best rock climbers, your everyday wants some fun rock climbers and a community that wants to see each other do their best? Why the Wellington round of the national indoor bouldering series.

Now there may be those of you who are going, what on earth is this person talking about, I’ll explain it. The national indoor bouldering series or NIBS is a rock climbing event focused on the bouldering discipline of the sport, low height climbing that requires no ropes. The aim? To climb at least 7 of the hardest climbs or problems you can, the top five will have the opportunity to compete in the finals, however the competition is open to everyone and you can enter just for fun.

Well Hangdog Rock Climbing had the privilege of hosting this year’s Wellington event, a part of this privilege is providing the people to create the problems for the completion, which is no small feat. We’re talking about a minimum of 56 problems that need to be climbable by children, fun and creative. I’ll be the first to say it after climbing the problems after the competition the setting team did an epic job.

Being the last round in the series this would be the deciding round for the entire series, and the competitors did not disappoint. The finalist for open women were: Rebecca Hounsell, Bella Domaneschi, Erica Gatland, Emma De Lange and Kiri Shibahara. Meanwhile in the men’s round the qualifiers were: Sefton Priestley, Rob Gajland, Fin Newton-Howes, Oliver Shanks, Angus Kirk, Anthony Chui and Fabrizio Facchini. You might be wondering, wait, that’s more than the ten qualifiers I mentioned earlier, there were several ties many extra competitors.

Finals round looked a bit different than the qualifiers. Each climber had the opportunity to climb 3 problems, each problem they had four minutes to attempt to climb as high as they could in as few attempts as possible. Each problem the competitors will be scored on how high they managed to get. In the event of a tie the person who got to their highest point in as few attempts would place better. The winner  overall would be the person who scored highest.

After a hard fought finals your Wellington top 3 women were: in 3rd place Bella Domaneschi, 2nd place Rebecca Hounsell and clinching 1st Miriam Bright. For The men’s round your top 3 were: in 3rd place Oliver Shanks, in 2nd place Sefton Priestley and the 1st place male Fin Newton-Howes.

Overall the day was a huge success. But remember even though I’m celebrating the winners in this article, that was only a very small part of the day. It was really about getting out with some like minded people and getting to try some brand new problems.

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