Lander, WY – Wyoming Catholic College’s Office of Student Life has finally succeeded in their efforts to halt the so-called “Baldwin Via Ferrata.”
Planned by residents of St. Leo’s dormitory for years, their proposed horizontal, harnessed climbing traverse route would have fully wrapped around the “cliffs” of the college’s historic Baldwin Building at second story height.
“It was gonna be fire,” said Ezekial Leed, a junior at WCC who was one of the strongest proponents of the project.
“A reason to do something other than video games,” chimed in his roommate Garrison Mayer. “Of course certain limitations would have been in place. We wouldn’t ever run the route during the day, or when people were around. Only after curfew when we wouldn’t be bothering anybody. But the old NIMBYs were at it again.
The Office of Student Life has been arguing for months, and we now know, successfully, that the proposed via ferrata route would have cut across the habitations and nesting grounds of an endangered species known as professors or faculty. Through its “No Via Ferrata on Professor Cliffs” campaign, it has attempted and now succeeded in persuading the Wyoming Catholic College of the recklessness of making the college’s primary academic building into an outdoor recreation spot.
As one Student Life work-study student tasked with running the campaign commented under the condition of anonymity to IIT. “Professors live up there. Imagine if you were one of them. Would you want climbers, especially that Leo’s crowd outside your window all evening long? I wouldn’t.”
However, the real reason that the “Leo’s boys” were prevented from just going ahead and building their via ferrata route wasn’t because of some public outreach campaign warning about the negative impacts of a via ferrata. Actually, it was quite simple. A new rock climbing video game was just released by GametheNightAway Inc. And obviously, Leo’s boys are now far more interested in just playing that all night long, every night, which leaves them no time to climb anything real.
You see, maybe sometimes technology does help keep people out of bigger trouble…