Josh and Jen’s new reality is born of the vision of expat American and climbing enthusiast Andy Magness.
“Some of the best climbing in New Zealand – if not the best – is in the Darran Mountains in the Milford Sound,” says Andy. “There’s this range of incredible peaks and amazing world class climbs.”
Having handy rockfaces is one thing - but actually being able to climb them is quite another.
“I noticed we had this amazing crag that we were the closest to and nobody in Te Anau was climbing it,” says Andy. “It was all people from Christchurch and Queenstown, where they had a climbing culture.”
A major factor in that was the absence of an adequate local training facility. Previous plans to install a climbing wall in the town’s largest building – the recreation centre – had never come to fruition.
“The idea had just never gotten legs,” says Andy.
The tireless efforts of Andy and Fiordland College outdoor education teacher Vaughn Filmer and a $66,000 grant from Meridian’s Waitaki Power Up fund changed that.
After a spell teaching at Fiordland College in 2008, Andy relocated with his wife and two sons to Te Anau permanently in 2014. The move wasn’t exactly planned – with a short holiday morphing into a decision to sell their North Dakota home and possessions remotely and live in a small cabin on a friend’s Te Anau property.
Andy found himself with time on his hands, enabling him to pursue his dual passions of rock climbing and adventure racing. He formed the non-profit FEAR (Fiordland Endurance & Adventure Racing) Society to help facilitate adventure racing opportunities.
Through adventure racing Andy met Meridian head of electricity supply Brett Horwell. The pair discussed Andy’s vision for the climbing wall, with Horwell encouraging the FEAR society to apply for a Power Up grant.
“At that stage it was still very much a pie in the sky dream,” says Andy
As the saying goes, if you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big. Guided by the experiences of similar projects that had settled for building smaller walls only to see interest fizzle when limitations were quickly reached, the group went all in on a massive wall featuring 13 top-ropes, 4 auto-belays, a lead climbing cave, and boulder wall.
“We wanted to create a community,” says Andy. “We knew that people would have to be continually engaged – that meant it was going to be a quarter of a million dollars to build the thing. That seemed like a huge amount of money – but we just decided to go for it.”
Meridian’s Power Up contribution provided the catalyst the project needed.
“That was a huge thing for us - we were able to leverage it pretty significantly,” says Andy.
Other funders such as community and gaming trusts followed and, with the momentum growing, the society crowd-funded another $60,000 from local residents and businesses.
Less than a year after the Meridian grant was received, construction began.
With volunteer labour helping to keep costs down, the wall began to rise.
“It was so cool seeing the wall take shape,” says Andy. “And it has been a wild ride ever since. We are almost three years down the road and it is still so well used.
“We’ve now got this incredible climbing community. That vision that we had has come to fruition.”
Further Power Up grants have supported the construction of a bouldering wall and the purchase of a scissor lift, helping the project to evolve and meet the needs of the community.
The FEAR society team recently launched free women’s only nights, and the facility is used regularly by students from as far away as Northern Southland College.
Andy estimates a couple of thousand unique climbers have tackled the wall. It’s particularly popular with seasonal workers and overseas visitors who pass through bound for Fiordland National Park.
But by far the biggest impact has been unlocking the recreational opportunities provided by the surrounding environment and the social connections formed by the town’s locals.
“We’ve got kids who had never climbed before who started climbing on the wall and it has changed their lives,” says Andy.
“They are going to the Darran’s every weekend and climbing these incredibly hard grades and loving it. They’ve got a passion for it – and the climbing wall was the catalyst.”
Having progressed from having something to do on a rainy winter’s night to lead climbing up serious rock faces, Jen doesn’t take the opportunity the wall has provided for granted.
“You actually do have to stop yourself every now and then when you are out somewhere crazy and say ‘this is so cool to be able to do this – we are lucky’,” she says.
“If we didn’t have the climbing wall I wouldn’t’ have done half the things I’ve done in the last two years. It’s pretty awesome.”
