Thirteen summers of national bouldering comps in New Zealand, 2003–2016
For a little over a decade, New Zealand had a national bouldering competition that most other countries would have found slightly mad. Instead of meeting in a gym, competitors drove to boulder fields on farmland and conservation land, spread out across the rock with score cards, and climbed outdoor problems all day. Later the competition moved indoors, and an indoor national series still runs today.
This note is a neutral history of that period, roughly 2003 to 2016, when the web address you are reading now belonged to the series website. We are an independent site with no connection to the series, its organisers or the clubs involved. We have left out names and results on purpose. The aim is to record how the competitions worked and why they changed.
Before the series: comps on rock
Competition climbing in New Zealand started outdoors. Wikipedia's article on rock climbing in New Zealand records the country's first rock climbing competition in 1987, on the limestone crags at Duntroon in North Otago, and an outdoor competition at Motuoapa near Lake Taupō in 1990. The same article notes that indoor climbing walls spread through the 1990s, but bouldering itself was still mostly something people did outside, on boulders they found.
By the early 2000s, a few areas had become well known: the huge limestone basin around Castle Hill in Canterbury, the Airstrip boulders near Waitomo in the King Country, and the coastal boulders east of Wellington Harbour. These became the obvious places to hold a competition.
The outdoor years, about 2003 to 2009
The series website first appears in web archives at the end of 2003. In those years it was a small, hand-built site announcing a national bouldering series held outdoors over several summer weekends. Rounds were run on real rock at the Waitomo limestone, at Baring Head on the Wellington south coast, and at the Jardines and Spittle Hill areas in the Castle Hill basin.
The format was simple and practical. Problems were picked on the natural boulders and given grades, and each problem was worth points according to its grade. Climbers had a day to tick as many as they could, with their best results counting. There were categories for experienced and less experienced climbers, and for juniors. Volunteers ran it, and the tone of the event was about participation as much as winning.
Running a comp on real rock is very different from running one indoors. The weather decides everything, and a wet forecast can cancel a round at short notice. Some venues needed a long walk or rough vehicle access. The problems were whatever the rock offered, not something a setter could adjust. And landowners and land managers had to agree to dozens of climbers, their crash pads and their cars arriving on the same day.
The 2010s: new scoring, new rounds, an indoor series
Around 2010 the website moved to a content-managed system with news, rules and results pages, and the series started changing quickly. Archived page addresses from 2010 refer to a new scoring system and a new category for the 2011 season. Our note on how bouldering comps are scored explains the Fibonacci-style idea in general terms: points that climb steeply with difficulty, so one hard problem is worth more than several easy ones.
Outdoor rounds continued for a few more seasons. Archived news items mention rounds at Baring Head, Waitomo, Spittle Hill and Castle Hill, and the 2012 programme also included Wānaka and Turakirae Head. Two of those areas are covered in our notes on Waitomo's limestone and the Wellington south coast.
At the same time an indoor series began in climbing gyms. The official national indoor series site dates the indoor series from 2010. Gym rounds were held in several cities, and indoor events soon became the main focus.
The bouldergaine, 2014
The most unusual event of the period came in March 2014, when a bouldergaine was held at Kura Tāwhiti / Castle Hill. It crossed bouldering with rogaining: teams of two navigated a mapped boulder field, collecting checkpoints and climbing for bonus points. Wikipedia's article on the format cites the old series website as one of its sources. We have written a separate account of how the bouldergaine worked.
Indoors for good, 2014 to 2016
By 2014 the website was presenting itself as the home of the national indoor bouldering series, with news and results from rounds in gyms in cities such as Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland. The last archived captures of the site date from early 2016. After that the domain lapsed, and the series continued under its own newer website.
Why did the competition move indoors? Mostly for the same reasons comps have moved indoors around the world. Indoor rounds can run whatever the weather, setters can make problems fit each category, and spectators and judges can see the whole field. They also avoid the wear and access pressure of putting many climbers on fragile outdoor rock on a single day.
The series today
The national indoor bouldering series is still going. Its official site describes it as celebrating 16 years from 2010 to 2026, with 2026 rounds in Wellington, Dunedin, Auckland and Christchurch. Wikipedia's article on the New Zealand Alpine Club says the club sponsors an annual national bouldering series. If you want to compete, check the organisers' site for current rules, dates and entries. We don't publish any of that here.
What we've left out, and why
The old website published results, photos, sponsor lists and contact details, and people still link to some of those pages. We have not copied any of it. Results belong to the people who earned them and to the organisers who recorded them, and the photos and documents were never ours. Where old links point at this address, they now lead to the closest page on this site, or to our archive note, which explains the change.