{"id":431671,"date":"2026-08-13T10:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/431671\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T10:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:42:12","slug":"the-san-francisco-rock-climbing-spot-known-for-its-shiny-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/431671\/","title":{"rendered":"The San Francisco Rock Climbing Spot Known For Its Shiny Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

View the full episode transcript<\/a>.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s<\/a> Beaver Street is just two blocks long. It climbs from Castro Street up a steep hill toward Corona Heights, a few blocks from the Castro Theater.<\/p>\n

Tucked into the curve of this tiny street is a narrow park, and inside it, a 60-foot slab of rock that towers over a public playground. The rock is streaked with diagonal bands of red and tan that make it look almost like a slice of bacon \u2014 with a surface unlike any rock Bay Curious listener Ravi Bhoraskar had seen.<\/p>\n

Bhoraskar first stumbled across the Beaver Street rock wall<\/a> during a weekend outing with his daughters, to the Randall Museum of Science in Corona Heights Park.<\/p>\n

\"\"Max Stewart belays Ravi Bhoraskar as he climbs the Beaver Street wall in San Francisco\u2019s Corona Heights Park.<\/p>\n

He described it as a \u201cshiny, almost slippery-looking surface\u201d with a few sparse holes \u201cthat you can potentially use to climb on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The secluded crag felt like a revelation. He recently started rock climbing, and climbs weekly at his neighborhood gym in the Mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was excited to learn that there is at least one [outdoor] climbing spot within the city, easily reachable by bus,\u201d Bhoraskar said.<\/p>\n

\nA visible record of Bay Area geology\n<\/p>\n

Bhoraskar\u2019s first clue to the origins of the Beaver Street rock came from a sign posted at its base. Known as a \u201cslickenside,\u201d the sign explained: \u201cThis smooth rock face was once inside a fault. Its surface was polished by millions of years of geological activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slickenside is a type of rock that forms along fault lines, like the San Andreas Fault that slashes diagonally across San Francisco. When two rocks on either side of the fault rub against each other, the friction between them can generate heat and super-fine particles of dust.<\/p>\n

That dust acts like a lubricant, polishing the rock surface until it becomes glassy and smooth, just like the rock on Beaver Street. The colorful stripes on a slickenside formation even record the direction the rocks were moving, allowing geologists to track the movement of different faults across time.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Beaver Street Wall in Corona Heights Park in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2026. The rock wall is open to climbing and is primarily used for top-rope climbing.<\/p>\n

According to the City of San Francisco\u2019s posted signage, the rock wall on Beaver Street is thought to be one of the largest exposed slickenside formations in the world.<\/p>\n

This sign also serves as a reminder of a small municipal battle over access to the rock<\/a>. In 2014, the city instituted a permitting process for climbers hoping to scale the slick stone wall.<\/p>\n

San Francisco climbers protested and eventually persuaded the city to drop the permits \u2014 on the condition that local climbing groups and the signage at Beaver Street emphasized a \u201cleave no trace\u201d policy.<\/p>\n

\nHow a Berkeley park changed climbing history\n<\/p>\n

The rock on Beaver Street is one of a handful of outdoor climbing areas in San Francisco proper, but across the bay in the Berkeley Hills sits another city park where climbers have pushed the sport forward for nearly a century.<\/p>\n

Indian Rock Park<\/a> encompasses a collection of volcanic boulders in the hills overlooking the UC Berkeley campus. Long a place of significance to Ohlone people<\/a>, these boulders have also played an outsized role in the Bay Area\u2019s climbing history. John Sherman remembers getting introduced to the sport here in the 1970s, when he was a student at El Cerrito High.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it\u2019s kind of a funny story,\u201d Sherman said. \u201cSome friends and I scored some beer. Of course, we weren\u2019t of legal drinking age, so we were really excited, and we wanted to find some place where we\u2019d be semi-hidden to drink it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took a real beating back in those days,\u201d Sherman explained of his early bouldering experiments at Indian Rock. \u201cThere weren\u2019t that many people, like myself, who were daft enough to go through that and keep beating themselves up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sherman is now a climbing legend<\/a> within the Bay Area and beyond.<\/p>\n

He was the first person to scale and document hundreds of new routes in a now-esteemed bouldering area in Texas, called Hueco Tanks<\/a>, and he helped to invent the \u201ccrash pads\u201d that boulderers use to cushion their falls<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

But his most recognizable contribution to the Bay Area\u2019s climbing culture is one that Sherman doesn\u2019t like to talk about.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"A view of the skyline from the Beaver Street Wall in Corona Heights Park in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2026. The rock wall is open to climbing and is primarily used for top-rope climbing.<\/p>\n

He invented a system to grade the difficulty of bouldering climbs, dubbed the \u201cV grading system\u201d <\/a>\u2014 as in, the Vermin grading system. This is a system now widely used by climbing gyms, which rates the easiest climbs at V0 and goes up numerically (V1, V2, V3 and so on) as the difficulty increases.<\/p>\n

Sherman said he dislikes how fixated other climbers have become with his grading system.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just think of climbing grades as the excrement of the climbing experience,\u201d he said. He described the \u201cnutrition\u201d of the climbing experience as being all the things that make climbing worthwhile: the camaraderie, the \u201ckinesthetic flow of the movement\u201d and a communion with nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then what happens afterwards?\u201d he said. \u201cOut pops a V grade.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nA safer way to fall\n<\/p>\n

Sherman prefers to think of himself as part of a long lineage of Bay Area climbers who have sharpened their skills on the urban rock faces available to them.<\/p>\n

At Indian Rock, for example, a group of Berkeley law students and mountaineers were preparing for ascents in Yosemite Valley as early as the 1930s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mountain climbing at the time was extraordinarily dangerous. The gear was heavy and awkward, and the safety equipment didn\u2019t really work. Climbers used ropes made of hemp \u2014 stiff, dry, and prone to snapping if pulled too quickly. Most people assumed a fall on a climbing route was fatal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rope\u2019s gonna break, and that\u2019s it, you know?\u201d Sherman said.<\/p>\n

\"\"An anchor chain at the top of the Beaver Street Wall in Corona Heights Park in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2026. The rock wall is open to climbing and is primarily used for top-rope climbing.<\/p>\n

But the Berkeley students climbing at Indian Rock developed a counterintuitive idea to change that.<\/p>\n

The solution was all in how climbers handled the rope. If a belayer let the rope run through their hands and slowly absorbed the force of a fall, the rope was far less likely to snap \u2014 and could actually catch a falling climber without killing them.<\/p>\n

Climbers began practicing these controlled, \u201cslow\u201d rope falls by jumping off the boulders at Indian Rock, and they carried the life-saving technique with them to Yosemite. By the 1940s, nylon was commercially accessible<\/a>, and climbers began making stronger, more shock-absorbent ropes from it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then all of a sudden things got a lot safer,\u201d Sherman said. \u201cThe nylon ropes were less prone to breaking than hemp ropes were.\u201d<\/p>\n

Falling was no longer a death sentence, and the sport became more popular as a result. As new tools and techniques made climbing safer, the goals of the sport shifted too.<\/p>\n

\u201cStyle was more important than difficulty, and you were more respected if you could walk up to a climb and climb it without falling \u2026 just figuring it out,\u201d Sherman said.<\/p>\n

By the 1960s, climbing was no longer just about the summit \u2014 it was about finding a creative way up each rock, and making the act of climbing itself beautiful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nThe secret climbs on University of California, Berkeley campus\n<\/p>\n

Climbers still wanted to test themselves on big routes in Yosemite and Joshua Tree, but the Bay Area\u2019s natural geology was limited, and climbing gyms weren\u2019t yet common. So climbers had to look for training grounds in some unexpected places.<\/p>\n

Jordan Schultz is the kind of climber who sees potential everywhere \u2014 even across the UC Berkeley campus, where he\u2019s cataloged hundreds of \u201cbuildering\u201d routes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I listed, like, 300-plus routes just on campus,\u201d Schultz said. \u201cPretty much every building is climbable, is what I found out, if you look at it in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"From left to right, climbers Ace Landauer, Jordan Schultz, Tilly Holtz and Colin Wills hang from cracks in the \u201cpenny wall,\u201d a spot on the UC Berkeley campus where rock climbers practice crack climbing techniques required for climbs in Yosemite Valley.<\/p>\n

Schultz documented these routes \u2014 and the history behind them \u2014 in his guidebook, Campusing: A Secret History and Buildering Guide to UC Berkeley<\/a>. One of the university\u2019s most famous unofficial routes is a crack running up the side of a brick building that houses the chemistry department.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t really look like much when you look at it,\u201d Schultz said. \u201cI think that\u2019s the beautiful part about it. You need to open your eyes to it, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

Climbers have used this crack to practice technique since at least the 1960s, Schultz said, because it mirrors the kind of crack climbing common in Yosemite and other parts of the Sierra.<\/p>\n

\nEpisode transcript\n<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: I\u2019m Olivia Allen-Price and you\u2019re listening to Bay Curious.<\/p>\n

When I was about six months pregnant with my first child, a friend of a friend passed along a maternity climbing harness \u2026 a full body nylon contraption that allows pregnant people to keep rock climbing.<\/p>\n

Now, I was not a rock climber at the time, but thought \u2014 \u201chey, why not? A lot of other activities I love, like running, have gotten really hard, but my legs are stronger than ever. Let\u2019s climb!\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon I found myself halfway up a wall in Pinnacles National Park \u2026 having a blast, but also hearing the voice of my mother inside my head: \u201cOh, Olivia. You would.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be honest, my stint with rock climbing was relatively short, but I was into it long enough to hit up most of the bigger climbing areas in the Bay Area. And I learned you don\u2019t have to drive all the way to Yosemite to feel the thrill of scaling a cliff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are a handful of urban climbing areas you might have walked past without a second look.<\/p>\n

Bay Curious listener Ravi Bhoraskar [[boh-RAHS-car]] stumbled across one of those hidden rock walls \u2026 tucked into the hills of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: It looked to me like a residential street. A bunch of cute houses, uh, and, like, a little narrow path in the middle.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: Beaver Street itself is just two blocks long. It climbs from Castro Street up a steep hill towards Corona Heights. The Castro Theater is just a few blocks away.<\/p>\n

And tucked into the curve of Beaver Street is a narrow park.<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: And as you come in, you get this giant piece of shiny rock, which is the Beaver Street Wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: This big slab of rock towers 60 feet above a kids\u2019 playground. It\u2019s got these diagonal streaks of red and tan rock that honestly make it look almost like a slice of bacon. And it has an unusual texture\u2026<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: It\u2019s kind of like a shiny, almost slippery-looking surface, with some holes that you can potentially use to climb on.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: This interested Ravi because he recently got into rock climbing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Mostly indoors at the climbing gym. I was excited to learn that there is, like,\u00a0at least one climbing spot right within the city, like, easily reachable by bus.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: And he wants to know \u2026 what is that slippery, striped bacon rock?<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: How did it end up there, and why does it look so cool?<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: And most importantly\u2026<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Like, can I climb it?<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: Today we\u2019re going to get answers for Ravi, of course. But we\u2019ll also explore how Bay Area climbers have used city parks to practice their skills for decades \u2014 and ultimately push the sport forward. Turns out there\u2019s a lot of rock climbing history anchored right here in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n

KQED producer Francesca Fenzi headed to Beaver Street with Ravi \u2026 to check out this unusual rock.<\/p>\n

Birds singing, slight traffic sounds<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Ravi and I arrive at Corona Heights Park on a sunny weekend afternoon.\u00a0We can hear birds singing \u2026 and the faint sound of traffic from Market Street carrying up the hill.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a playground, a dense pocket of trees, and then \u2026 this glistening rock wall.<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: It\u2019s not wet, but it looks wet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: The shiny surface is interrupted by a single jagged crack, which runs about six stories high. And at the base of the rock is a sign \u2026 which gives us a clue about how it got here.<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Known as a slickenslide, this smooth rock face was once inside a fault. Its surface was polished by millions of years of geological activity.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: It\u2019s Slicken SIDE actually. Try saying that three times fast!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Slickenside forms when two rocks inside a fault rub against each other. Imagine pressing your hands together as hard as you can and then sliding them back and forth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That friction creates heat \u2014 and tiny dust particles which act like a fluid \u2014 to polish the rock until it looks glassy and smooth. Just like the wall at Beaver Street. The colorful stripes even show the direction the fault was moving when a Slickenside was formed.<\/p>\n

According to the sign, this rock is thought to be one of the largest exposed Slickenside formations in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Capitals, \u201cPlease do not chip holes in the rock face or alter the rock in any way.\u201d And then it\u2019s taped over Um, climbing on these rocks is by permit only. To obtain a permit, call some number.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: I looked into getting a permit and it turns out you no longer need one to climb at Beaver Street. So Ravi is going to try to climb it today.<\/p>\n

And to make sure we don\u2019t damage the rock, we\u2019ve enlisted some help.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Hey, how you doing? I\u2019m Max. Hey, Ravi. Ravi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Max Stewart owns a guiding company, called SAANO Adventures. And he\u2019s offered to help us set up an anchor and climbing rope on the Beaver Street wall\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: I\u2019d be happy to. Did you bring some shoes?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: I brought some shoes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Yeah? Okay. Cool.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Outdoor rocks don\u2019t come with built-in safety equipment like the climbs in a gym, so we\u2019ll need to secure our rope to something sturdy at the top of the rock wall.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: There\u2019s a little staircase here. Yep, there it is.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Max leads us up and around the back side of the rock, to the top of a windy hill.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can pick out landmarks like the diagonal slash of Market Street below, the Salesforce tower and the Bay Bridge in the distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Directly in front of us is a steep drop off. It looks a lot more intimidating from up here!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Isn\u2019t that wild? So the playground. we met just right down there. There\u2019s the sign that you were reading.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Separating us from the edge of the cliff is a chain link fence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: And then a bunch of heavy duty chains that we\u2019re gonna use.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: These heavy duty chains bolted into the top of the wall are perfect for setting up what\u2019s called a \u201ctop rope\u201d climb, where a rope runs from the ground, up to an anchor, and back down to the climber, catching them if they fall.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Always a little weird!<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Max explains that this is the same setup used by climbing gyms \u2026 even if it looks a bit different outside.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi in scene: Oh, man. That was impressive. [to Ravi] Is this what you were expecting?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: No, not at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi in scene: A little different than the climbing gym, huh?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Yeah, yeah, definitely.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: I\u2019ve climbed outside a bit myself and part of what I love is the sense of possibility. There aren\u2019t any predetermined holds, you can find your own route up to the top.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Every single person is gonna have their own method for solving this. the gyms I think are a really good place to get started, to kinda just learn the ropes, but I really encourage people as soon as, you feel like you can do it, to get outside.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi in scene: Is this gonna be your first time climbing outside?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Uh, yes. Yes, this will be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: No way, really?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: Yeah.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Oh, it\u2019s so fun.<\/p>\n

Sound of climbing over chain link fence<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: When was the last time you were hopping [00:07:00] fences to go climbing. Hey. It feels kinda like you\u2019re doing stuff you\u2019re not supposed to do, hopping fences and \u2026 It\u2019s like good clean fun, but still kind of a throwback, you know?<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: No laws were broken in the making of this podcast! But Max is right. Setting up the rope above Beaver Street really does feel like getting away with something.<\/p>\n

Music starts<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: A lot of urban climbs FEEL illicit because it seems kind of unnatural to be doing something we associate with mountains right in our backyards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, there\u2019s actually a long history of Bay Area climbers using whatever they can find to ready themselves for those more ambitious, wild ascents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beaver Street is one of the only rocks you can climb outdoors in San Francisco, but just across the bay, in the Berkeley Hills, is another city park where climbers have been pushing the limits of the sport for almost a century.<\/p>\n

John Sherman grew up in Berkeley. And he remembers getting introduced to climbing there.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: Well, it\u2019s kind of a funny story. Some friends and I in high school, we scored some beer. Of course, we weren\u2019t of legal drinking age, so we were really excited, and we wanted to find some place where we, you know, we\u2019d be semi-hidden to drink it.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: So they made their way to Indian Rock park, a collection of volcanic boulders that was once an Ohlone meeting spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Sherman: And we were sitting on the steps there drinking this beer we had gotten, and I saw people climbing there.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: The climbers were just a few feet off the ground \u2026 practicing gravity-defying moves.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: That day I got fascinated with it, and I wanted to try it myself.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Pretty soon, he was taking the bus to Indian Rock every day after school.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: And I would always have my climbing shoes in my book bag along with my textbooks and stuff, and I would stop there on the way home every day, go to Indian Rock and boulder till it got dark and then walk home.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: He was at the rock so often that his brother started describing himself as an only child.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: I got hooked, and I\u2019ve been doing it every day since. And, you know, it\u2019s been over 50 years now.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: The type of climbing John was doing is called bouldering. There aren\u2019t any ropes, but people climb closer to the ground, using pads to cushion a fall. At least, they do now. But in the early days\u2026<\/p>\n

John Sherman: We took a real beating and there weren\u2019t that many people like myself who were daft enough to go through that and keep beating themselves up like that.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: John is a bit of a legend. He was the first person to climb a bunch of famous bouldering routes, he helped invent those cushioned pads, AND he created a system for ranking the difficulty of climbs \u2014 called the V grading system \u2014 that\u2019s widely used today. It starts with the easiest climbs at V0 and goes up from there as the climbing gets harder \u2014 V1, V2 and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The V comes from John\u2019s lifelong nickname, given to him by a biology teacher at El Cerrito High.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: So he called me Sherman the Vermin. Got shortened to Verm and just kind of stuck.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: John actually hates how fixated other climbers get on his V grading system.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: I just think of climbing grades as the excrement of the climbing experience. After you do a wonderful, you know, boulder problem, and you enjoy the setting that you\u2019re in, the camaraderie of your climbing partners, the kinesthetic flow of the moves and everything, and then what happens afterwards? Out pops a V grade.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Instead, John likes to think of himself as part of a long line of climbers honing their skills at Indian Rock.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: The early history that I know of that\u2019s documented goes back to like the 1930s<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: At that time, a group of Berkeley law students \u2014 and mountaineers \u2014 had their sights on Yosemite Valley.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: And here is a collection of rocks where they could train.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: The training part was important. Because at the time mountain climbing was super dangerous. The gear was heavy and awkward. The safety equipment didn\u2019t really work.<\/p>\n

Climbers were using these flimsy ropes made out of hemp that were stiff and dry and tended to break if they got pulled apart too quickly.<\/p>\n

John says most people assumed that falling on a climbing route was a death sentence.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: The rope\u2019s gonna break and that\u2019s it, you know?<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: But these Berkeley students, climbing at Indian Rock. They came up with a counterintuitive idea.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: More on their idea and how it revolutionized climbing after this quick break. Stay with us.<\/p>\n

Sponsor message<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: UC Berkeley Students climbing at Indian Rock wanted to make climbing safer, and they discovered a technique that would really change the game. Francesca Fenzi takes it from here.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: It was all in how you handled the rope\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Sherman: If you let it run through your hands and slowly break the fall, that rope might not snap, and you can actually catch the leader if they fall, and they\u2019re not gonna die.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: This was huge. Climbers started practicing these \u201cslow\u201d rope falls by jumping off the boulders at Indian Rock. And they brought these life-saving skills to Yosemite with them.<\/p>\n

A decade later, in the 1940s, nylon was widely available. And climbers started using the stretchy fiber to make stronger, more shock-absorbant ropes.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: And then all of a sudden things got a lot safer. The nylon ropes were less prone to breaking than hemp ropes were.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Falling on a rock climb was no longer a death sentence and that made the sport a lot more popular.<\/p>\n

As new tools and techniques made climbs safer, the goals of climbing changed, too.<\/p>\n

John Sherman: Style was more important than difficulty.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: John says by the time he got hooked, rock climbing was no longer just about getting to the top. It was about finding creative ways up a rock, and making the act of climbing itself beautiful.<\/p>\n

Climbers were still eager to test themselves on the big climbs in places like Yosemite and Joshua Tree. But the Bay Area\u2019s natural geology was limiting. And climbing gyms \u2014 with their variety of simulated rock types \u2014 weren\u2019t as common as they are today.<\/p>\n

So for Bay Area climbers to take their skills to the next level \u2026 they had to look in some unexpected places.<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: Pretty much every building is climbable is what I found out, if you look at it in the right way.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Jordan Schulz is the kind of climber who looks at it \u201cthe right way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: He\u2019s 23 and sees climbing opportunities everywhere. Even the UC Berkeley campus, where he\u2019s showing me one of the university\u2019s most famous climbing \u201croutes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a crack in the side of a brick building that houses the Chemistry department.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: This is the crack we\u2019re looking at right here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: It takes me a moment to \u201csee\u201d it the way Jordan does.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi in scene: To me, I\u2019m looking at a brick wall with a parking sign on it. Yeah. And there\u2019s a gap in the wall that\u2019s maybe about an inch and a half thick. And it runs from the base of the wall to the the next story up.<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: Yeah. That\u2019s the climb. It doesn\u2019t really look like much when you look at it. And then I think that\u2019s the beautiful part about it, is that you need to open your eyes to it, you know?<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Jordan says climbers have been using the crack in this building to practice their technique since at least the 1960s<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: A lot of the style of climbing in Yosemite and the Sierras features a lot of cracks in the rock. And so, it offers a good training ground to learn some crack climbing technique that would help people climb better in the mountains.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Jordan says this spot has another name: the Penny Wall. Back in the 60s, when a climber was practicing at the crack, they\u2019d stick a penny onto the highest brick they could reach.<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: And so people would see, like, how high was the penny, and every so often it would get higher.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: A challenge to the next climber\u2026<\/p>\n

Jordan Schulz: A subtle way of communicating you know, who climbed a little higher and moved the penny up.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: Back at Beaver Street, our question asker Ravi is getting ready to place his own metaphorical penny on the wall.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: All right, Ravi, let\u2019s get your shoes on- Yep<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: He\u2019s about to climb outside for the first time.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi in scene: How are you feeling about climbing it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: I\u2019m excited. I\u2019m also, yeah, a li- little nervous. Like, I don\u2019t want to slip, but, no, mostly excited. Mostly feeling excited about climbing this.<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Your belay is on. And climbing. Okay. Climb on, sir.<\/p>\n

Francesca Fenzi: The Bay Area\u2019s outdoor rock walls have been home to major breakthroughs in the sport. But as Max would say, they\u2019re also good clean fun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: What do you think of outdoor climbing versus, uh, in the gym?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ravi Bhoraskar: This is great.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Max Stewart: Isn\u2019t it so nice?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"View the full episode transcript. San Francisco\u2019s Beaver Street is just two blocks long. It climbs from Castro…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-431671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}