Konrad La Prade ’05 remembers spending a lot of time on roofs.
Cooking meals in a fire pit carried up from ground level. The first pipe he ever smoked. Conversations with friends that would stretch for whole evenings. One long conversation – six hours – with a female acquaintance, Joy, who would become his friend, then his girlfriend. When he married her, his bachelor party featured a trip up a building.
“It was just kind of a rite of passage,” La Prade said.
The buildings that dot Hillsdale’s campus do not often have this sort of significance for students. For most, these structures – dorms, union, library; Kendall and Lane, Howard and Sage – are merely the setting for student lives, the backdrop against which the daily activities of meals, classes, and socializing take place.
But while La Prade’s story is perhaps unique, his hobby of choice is certainly not. For many Hillsdale students, climbing campus buildings is just as alluring as ever.
The climbers are generally male and often from Simpson. They, too, view their pastime as a rite of passage, with older students passing their gradually accrued knowledge to their greener acquaintances.
“In the same way that there are routes up a mountain that you can learn, often you’ll get upperclassmen passing down how to get onto particular buildings,” senior Wes Wright said.
“It’s a way for younger students to show upperclassmen that they are up for adventures,” sophomore Don McChesney said.
Their laconic code is fitting for such an absurd, yet compelling hobby: “Because it’s there.”
Some buildings are popular destinations: the library, the sports complex. Others are more the stuff of legend: it’s been a while, for example, since anyone found their way to the top of Central Hall. Some students get a leg up from an unusual inside track.
“As student head of security, I got keys to the clock tower,” La Prade said. “We spent a lot of time walking around the whole campus.”
Even the more common climbs present unique challenges.
“The library is too visible,” said Garrett Holt ’14, former head RA of Simpson. “Central Hall is under lock and key, you might plummet to your death off the Sports Complex. But I would say the most challenging is the Security Office, for obvious reasons.”
Relationships between climbers and campus security have always been complicated, with varying degrees of friction over the years. Back in the early 2000s, as La Prade remembers it, “nobody cared.”
William Whorley, director of campus security, has a frostier view of the hobby. The biggest problem, he said, is the risk that climbing buildings poses to student safety.
“Here’s the problem that I think exists: they have very little fear of their mortality,” Whorley said. “That’s okay, provided common sense enters the equation. I’d like to help students in those interests in the right way.”
Damage to infrastructure is also a concern, but Whorley emphasized that student safety is always first and foremost.
“We can repair the roof; sometimes it’s difficult to repair the human body,” he said.
Whorley pointed out that campus tourism doesn’t have to be a surreptitious activity.
“If you want to go see the sights,” he said, “come see me.”
For most students, however, the appeal of climbing isn’t simply the climb itself, but the bonds of friendship generated by the experience.
“Just be wise,” Holt said. “Don’t abuse it. Roofs are great places for good conversation and reflection (and water balloon launchers). Some of my best times at Hillsdale were chillaxing a roof with some good friends, looking out over our beloved campus at the end of a long day.”
