Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind athlete to summit Mount Everest, spent time with visually impaired young people at a rock climbing gym in Watertown, Massachusetts, showing them how to find their way up a climbing wall without being able to see it. The encounter is the subject of a new CBS News Boston video posted Friday.
The 51-second clip, titled “First blind athlete to summit Everest teaches visually impaired kids how to rock climb,” comes from CBS News Boston. Weihenmayer is widely known as the only blind athlete to have scaled the world's Seven Summits, including Everest, according to a report from Patch.
Watertown's Central Rock Gym has hosted Weihenmayer before. An earlier Patch report described him giving climbing tips at the gym to Connor McLeod, a blind 14-year-old from Australia who was in Boston at the time. McLeod had just been honored the night before at a National Braille Press “A Million Laughs for Literacy” gala, the report said. Patch noted that McLeod had organized a national effort in Australia to push the government to change how money is printed so blind people could more easily identify currency.
A Gym Built for Adaptive Climbing
Central Rock Gym in Watertown already runs a standing program aimed at climbers with disabilities. Known as CRG Adaptive, the gym describes it as a volunteer-led effort focused on independent adults with physical disabilities, open to paraclimbers, climbers with physical disabilities and the volunteers who assist them, according to information from centralrockgym.com. The gym says it offers a discounted $10 rate for nonmembers that includes a harness, shoes and belay equipment, and asks participants to register in advance so staff can plan the right number of volunteers and rigging systems.
The idea of making a climbing wall legible without sight isn't new to the Boston area. A separate CBS News Boston report profiled Matthew Shifrin, a blind entrepreneur who built a Lego-based system to help visually impaired climbers navigate routes. In that system, a sighted person on the ground mocks up the wall using different Lego pieces to represent footholds, then relays the layout to the climber before they start up.
Not His First Time Guiding Blind Kids
Weihenmayer has made a habit of passing along his climbing experience to other visually impaired people. A CBS News Colorado report said he once spent a morning at the Anchor Center for Blind Children, guiding kids with severe visual impairments up their own version of Mount Everest. That visit, like the Watertown session, framed climbing as something blind athletes and kids could tackle with the right support rather than sight.
The exact details of Friday's Watertown session, including how many children took part and what specific instruction they received, were not spelled out beyond the video's title and the station's brief description. What is clear is that Weihenmayer, whose Everest summit made him a singular figure in the sport, chose to spend part of his visit passing climbing knowledge directly to the next generation of visually impaired climbers at a gym that already caters to adaptive athletes.
