A body in motion: From ballet, to the Appalachian Trail, to the climbing wall

The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” played over the speakers of a car shop turned climbing gym, as warm afternoon sun shone through the open garage doors. 

Belle Dunbar pulled the trigger on her 18-volt drill.

At the base of an artificial rock wall, she unscrewed a hot pink chunk of chalk-caked plastic and tossed it onto the crash pad. 

Above her on a ladder, co-worker Ava Davenport did the same, dismantling a route they had built just weeks before. 

The Verve’s anthem played on. The whir and rattle of bolts backing out of their holes drowned it out.

At The Circuit Bouldering Gym in Eugene, Dunbar and Davenport are route-setters — they design climbing routes, grade their difficulty and make sure they’re safe.

As the head setter, Dunbar leads the team through each reset.

“Something that is very important in the route-setting world is letting go,” Dunbar said. “You put up the route, but the moment you’re done with that route, it’s no longer yours. It’s everyone’s.”

Each week, Dunbar and a team reset a section of the gym, creating something new. But the space she creates isn’t only on the 15-foot wall.

The moment you’re done with that route, it’s no longer yours.

Dunbar, 33, has bouldered and rope-climbed from the granite monoliths at Yosemite to the jagged peaks of the Enchantments in Washington state. 

But she started in the swamp. 

Growing up in Florida, Dunbar danced through her adolescence, hanging up her ballet shoes when she graduated from high school. Through young adulthood, she missed the feeling of movements in her body. A friend invited her to a climbing trip in Colorado.

She was hooked.

Breaking barriers

After the Colorado trip, back home in Florida, the flattest state in the country, she didn’t have much to look up to. 

It was time for a change.

She turned a sandstone corner to where the Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia state lines meet.

Dunbar worked at a climbing gym in Atlanta. At the check-in desk, she watched her co-workers put up the route with ladders, drills and bolts. They would then “send it” across their new sequence.

They were all men.

“They need a woman on the set team,” said Dunbar, recalling a conversation with the route-setter, who told her he would think about it.

But something else at the time was calling her. 

“I went and hiked the Appalachian Trail,” she said.

With her dog, she walked 2,190 miles through the rolling hills and mountainous wilderness — from Georgia to Maine — and right into the 2020 pandemic. She outfitted a van, roadtripping and climbing her way west to Oregon.

She eventually got another check-in job at a climbing spot, The Circuit Bouldering Gym in Portland. 

“I still thought about it,” Dunbar said, of putting up routes.

This time, the setting team gave her a spot as a forerunner — essentially a test climber to evaluate the flow and safety of the skeletons, the word that routesetters use to describe their first draft of a route.

It was also an apprenticeship of sorts: The head setter calls the shots and others haul the holds and climb what’s put up. They all learn lessons along the way, like when you have a route that looks good on paper but doesn’t climb as it was planned.

“Sometimes you really want to make something work, and it’s just not,” Dunbar said. “It can be like learning to be unattached every single set day.”

When The Circuit opened its location in Eugene in 2024, Dunbar had seen — and done — enough to become the head route-setter herself.

Relative difficulty

In August, Dunbar sat at the front counter preparing for another set day, talking with gym manager Todd McCormick. No relation to the spice company, he said.

LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” came onto the speakers.

Dunbar and McCormick talked about grading the routes, which isn’t an exact science. Some setters lean on the Risk, Intensity and Complexity scale, known as RIC. Others turn to the V-scale, which runs V0 to V17, easiest to hardest.

The Circuit follows a system similar to this scale. 

The “V” traces back to climber Jon Sherman who standardized bouldering grades at Hueco Tanks, Texas, in the 1970s. 

“His nickname was ‘Sherman the Vermin,'” McCormick said.

Dunbar smiled, “I didn’t know that’s where the V comes from.” 

From there, the two lapsed into a conversation mostly made up of letters and numbers — going as far to discuss an entirely different system in Europe — for several minutes. The conclusion: It’s all relative.

“Like a V5 in Bishop, California, is going to feel different than a V5 in Smith Rock,” McCormick said.

“Because other people are making these assessments,” Dunbar said. “That goes right back to us assessing it. We’re assessing it to the best of our ability.”

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Many who come to climb are looking for more than a grade on a tag. They’re looking for connection. It can be heard in the cubbies, where climbers lace up their shoes and size up the wall, usually in far less technical terms.

As one climber recently asked his friend: 

“You want to climb that weird thing?”  

Creating, holding space

Connection doesn’t look the same for everyone in climbing gyms, especially for women, people of color, and people who are LGBTQ+. 

It’s something Dunbar knows personally. She recalled once trying to climb routes where no one was around. 

“It’s important to give women these spaces, because we haven’t felt welcomed for many years, and many people are still really timid and scared to enter something physical,” Dunbar said.

“I was lucky to have a couple of women be very kind and receptive like, ‘You’re new to the gym.’”

She remembers the feeling of being welcomed.

“I want to be that person for other people, too,” she said.

“The community that climbs here is extremely supportive. I know it can be scary, but I promise everyone wants you to be there and feel happy and comfortable. This is the most fun way for you to get strong.”

In the weeks after Dunbar and Davenport reset the wall, climbers swung and leaped across crayon-colored routes, grabbing everything from big bucket-like holds to finger-thin crimps. 

Everyone wants you to be there and feel happy and comfortable.

At this wall on Tuesday, Sept 29, the smoky scent of charcoal and searing beef drifted through the gym’s windows.

Outside, McCormick, in a tropical shirt, flipped burgers on two kettle grills for the gym’s seasonal barbecue — when it opened the doors for free climbing, and then free food and a free beer for after the session.

Bill Withers’ “A Lovely Day” came on.

Others who work at the gym set a buffet table with plates and utensils. Dunbar was back at the check-in desk, her drill handy to tighten any holds that may come loose.

As the sun set, a line of mostly college-aged visitors formed, and Dunbar welcomed them in.