Climber Builds Replica Wall Over Trump Claim

Impossible to climb? Rick Weber doesn't the think so. The climber and engineer has built a replica border wall to see if professional climbers can get over it, the Hill reports. Weber, 75, says he constructed the wall in response to President Trump's boast that even "20 mountain climbers" struggled to scale a section of border wall he visited last month in California. "Many in the climbing community were amused a couple weeks ago when our POTUS held a press conference at a section of his latest border wall design," he writes at Rock and Ice, adding later that "no one in our climbing community knows any of these 20 mountaineers. I doubt if they exist."

So Weber built an 18-foot-tall section of bollard wall much like a wall erected in May along the US-Mexico border; that said, it's shorter than the 30-foot wall Trump visited in September. "We have, I guess you could say, world-class mountain climbers. We got climbers," Trump said at the time. "...And we gave them different prototypes of walls, and this was the one that was hardest to climb." Weber's contest is planned for Oct. 11 and 12 in the Red River Gorge part of Kentucky, per HuffPo. There's no entry fee and prizes will be given. "To declare something to be impossible to climb to a bonafide rock climber is to issue a challenge," he writes. (More border wall stories.)