I’m driving through an intersection on the highway, lost in 100 thoughts about things I should have done, be doing or need to not forget about. I talk to my daughter about her day playing with friends and glance out my side window and there it is. A sign showing luscious pastel, fjordal mountains sloping into the sea, receding into the distance; Jumar.
Someone is building a development in Squamish called “Jumar.” I chuckle to myself and then laugh out loud at the idea that another developer has latched onto a climbing term to build an image of outdoor driven freedom by living in their condos. Do they know what a “Jumar” actually is?
Here’s why this is so funny that it made me laugh out loud to myself while driving my daughter home from daycare. Years ago, around 2014, a developer sought to build high-density condos near the Scott Crescent area, below the hospital. They named their development Redpoint Living, redpoint being a climbing term meaning to climb a route from bottom to top after rehearsal and practice, on lead and without any aid of gear or weighting the rope except in the event of a fall. They enlisted several climbers to be models and spokespeople for the development, showing that they were friends of the common people in the new Squamish. Long story short, the development never left planning stages because of design problems centered around spaghetti-like traffic constipation in the Scott Crescent area and traffic flows bunging up the highway. Many climbers laughed the development off as a desperate image grab by big business; an attempt to use the image of climbing to sell real estate.
The analogies of Redpoint living are pretty funny if you are a climber versed in unpacking some of these labelling terms. Metaphorically, Redpoint Living could have been chosen by developers because it aligns itself with persistence, hard work and finally success. Redpoints are climbing’s most popular and simple way of claiming mastery. Literally, Redpoint Living might translate into doggedly throwing yourself at a challenge, day in day out, sustaining injury, ebbs in motivation and all for many failures and very little success. As a development, Redpoint Living may have had some promise, but like a contrived sport route bolted too close to a mega classic hand crack, it was just not a good idea.
The name Jumar is even funnier to a climber. A Jumar is a Swiss piece of climbing gear first sold in 1958 as a rope ascending tool. Clamp it onto a rope, slide it up smoothly but load it downwards and it locked. Why would you name a condo development after the original rope ascending tool, used mainly in aid climbing and caving a long time ago? Are they saying that, like the Jumar, they are the first to be here, raising people’s lives in the new Squamish up, one centimeter at a time? Or maybe that by living in their units your life will mechanically click onto the fibrous sheath of existence, tenuously gripped by its tiny metal teeth, and slowly, surely, and with no chance of failure drag you onwards and upwards towards the summit? Yeesh, that’s pretty grim. In climbing, Jumars were prone to popping off if loaded sideways and so had to be used carefully in horizontal directions. That, and they were always used in pairs.
Literally, a Jumar is just a mechanical ascender and so life in Jumar will be a mechanically predictable one-way street to happiness as long as you either always live with another human or own two units? Maybe the name was meant to promote buyers to purchase two, just like sets of Jumars?
The world will never know why developers choose the terms they choose. One thing remains sure and true though, naming the development “Jugs”, a Jumar’s more colloquial and common name gives a much different image.
