Barber: Kevin Jorgeson wants to get kids rock climbing

Kevin Jorgeson wants to get a million kids climbing.

It sounds like the nightmare of an overprotective parent. To Jorgeson, it's a happy dream.

“I think that would be crazy,” he said. “And it may take a really, really, really long time to do it.”

Yes, it's a fanciful number, and perhaps an unrealistic one in a society that talks about, but does not actually seem to prize, physical activity. Then again, Jorgeson, a Santa Rosa native, is the guy who helped make doing the impossible fun again. When he and climbing partner Tommy Caldwell cracked the Dawn Wall route and stepped onto the rim of El Capitan in Yosemite two years ago, they planted a seed in many of their captivated witnesses: What's your Dawn Wall? Which outlandish personal goal will you pursue?

Jorgeson became a popular public speaker after that climb, and chasing the improbable became his core message to corporations and educators. He's still on the circuit. He recently returned from a tour of speaking engagements in Slovakia.

Jorgeson is training and climbing again, too. Last October he and partner Ben Rueck notched the first free ascent (using ropes only for safety, not propulsion) of the west face of Sentinel in Yosemite. In August he will head to the Bugaboos in southeastern British Columbia.

Amid all of that, though, Jorgeson has this other scheme. He wants to get climbing walls built at nonprofit children's clubs all over the United States.

“For these kids, there's life before a climbing wall was in there, and for a couple it's gonna be life after,” Jorgeson said. “Because they're going to realize they're not fast enough for football or tall enough for basketball. But they're really strong and really fast on the climbing wall, and they get that taste of success.

“For them, this simple little wall that we put in is gonna be this fork in the road of their life - life before climbing, and life after climbing. All it takes is one climb.”

Field trips are nice, Jorgeson figures, but his plan eliminates two of the biggest barriers to early climbing experiences: cost and proximity. He wants to break those down by partnering facilities like Boys & Girls Clubs with local climbing gyms. Experienced mountaineers will maintain safety equipment and reset routes - Jorgeson estimated it can be done with two days of work every quarter - and the kids will enjoy a climbing wall practically in their back yards.

Jorgeson first hatched the idea long before his Dawn Wall celebrity. In 2010 he helped raise money to get a wall installed at The Club Maxwell Village in Sonoma. (It's part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma Valley.) The wall is still there. It's especially popular in the summer.

The club in Sonoma doesn't get a lot of support for its climbing wall. Directors there maintain it themselves. So Jorgeson has evolved the concept.

Last month, he helped finalize what he calls his Pilot 2.0 - a wall at Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club in St. Louis. Eldorado Climbing Walls, a manufacturer in Colorado, donated the wall and the auto-belay system, gifts worth about $50,000. Jorgeson enlisted his friends Daniel and David Chancellor at Climb So iLL (get it, like Climb Southern Illinois?), a gym right down the street, to partner with the club and provide labor.

So iLL took the association further, pledging to devote a percentage of equipment sales to buying day passes for local kids. That, too, is part of Jorgeson's vision.

It doesn't have to be Boys & Girls Clubs, either. He figures this model would work with Big Brothers/Big Sisters or YWCAs or whatever.

Jorgeson eventually wants to implement his plan “at scale,” but he can't personally steer every new project. So he plans to incorporate a nonprofit organization to make it easier for others. When it's complete, Jorgeson believes he can connect manufacturers or gyms with children's clubs, and walk them through the steps necessary to get a climbing wall built. There will be a fundraising element, too.

“We hope to get this infrastructure in place, so that when, let's say, a climbing gym in Atlanta wants to do a project, we want to say, ‘OK, you raise half and we'll match it,'” Jorgeson explained.

He figures the nonprofit will be able to track participation through Boys & Girls memberships and day passes distributed.

“I want to see a tracker on the website,” Jorgeson said.

He has an ulterior motive in all of this. Jorgeson got his start on the indoor wall at Vertex in Santa Rosa. But his greatest joy has come on the boulders and granite faces of the outdoor world. Jorgeson said he wants to put more climbing walls in “urban environments.”

I'll go ahead and say it for him: Rock climbing has always been a fairly white pursuit. It still is. There's no real reason for that, other than exposure. Jorgeson in convinced all sorts of people can fall in love with the rock, just as he did.

“The walls at the Boys & Girls Club are designed to be introductory, a stepping stone into a new world,” he said. “And the climbing gym is that new world. And from the gym to go outside is another step into a new world. We design them to be a pathway to bigger and bigger and more open spaces.”

Later, Jorgeson phrased things a little differently: “It's just opening a door.”

An attic door, maybe. Open the portal and climb into the unknown. There's no telling where that door might lead a kid.

You can writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.