Grow Climber: A Journey of Courage, Movement, and Discovery

The Grow Climber is one of the museum’s signature experiences. It’s a two level adventure that invites children to climb, balance, and explore their way upward through an active landscape that celebrates growth in motion. As kids navigate nets, platforms, and pathways, the structure encourages them to stretch their abilities, build confidence, and discover how curiosity and challenge help them grow. Every part of the experience supports physical development: balance, coordination, strength, spatial awareness, while also nurturing social interaction, independence, and the joy of shared discovery.

Artist rendering of the Grow Climber

Rooted in the landscapes and communities of Grand Forks and the Red River Valley, the Grow Climber connects children to the world close to home. Its forms and textures echo the movement of land and sky. The experiences woven around it invite kids to harvest crops, role play community life, and discover the natural world through sensory rich, hands on exploration.

The Grow Climber stands as an emblematic sculpture visible from both inside the museum and from exterior sight lines, grounding the experience in the character of the Red River Valley, while signaling the museum’s spirit of play and possibility. Its geometry draws directly from the region’s agricultural rhythms: the upward sweep of wheat fields, the sturdy curves of sugar beets, and the layered textures of crops that shape daily life. By transforming these familiar forms into a climbable landscape, the structure invites children to engage with the Valley’s heritage in a way that feels both imaginative and deeply local, turning play into a quiet celebration of the place they call home.

Accessibility is integrated throughout, ensuring multiple ways to participate, engage, and feel included without separating experiences. Children can choose their own level of risk, effort, and height, with parallel play options that welcome younger visitors and scaffold challenge for older ones. Touch, sound, light, movement, and visual rhythm come together to create a multi sensory environment where growth feels both playful and profound.

On the first floor, children begin their ascent through a series of solid, sculptural platforms arranged in a vertical landscape. There’s no single ‘right’ way to climb. Kids choose their own routes, discovering new angles, new footholds, and new perspectives as they move upward. Every platform offers a moment of decision, encouraging problem solving, confidence, and self directed exploration. When they’re ready to return to the ground, a twisting slide offers a fast, joyful descent, becoming a swirl of motion that turns accomplishment into pure play.

Above the platforms, the experience shifts. Netted ramps create a flexible, responsive environment where children crawl, balance, and test how their bodies move through space. The nets bend and sway, giving kids a new kind of challenge, one that rewards curiosity and invites them to try again, try differently, and keep going. The Sky Stepper adds a moment of awe: an accessible glass floor that lets visitors (including those using wheelchairs) glide across the space while looking down at the activity below. It’s a gentle thrill, a connection between levels, and a reminder that bravery comes in many forms.

Nearby, the Sun Dial brings light and motion to life. Children turn a large ship wheel that rotates layered translucent patterns across a stylized sun, creating shifting colors and dancing light. LED ‘neon’ rays respond in real time, extending the movement outward in a radiant display that feels both magical and scientific.

Surrounding the climber, a series of region inspired experiences extend the same themes of movement, growth, and rising upward. Waves of Wheat transforms the motion of the prairie into play, letting children send ripples across a shimmering field with a single burst of air, a horizontal echo of the vertical motion happening on the climber itself. Roots & Shoots turns effort into ascent as kids race light up a corn stalk from roots to tassel, mirroring the feeling of climbing higher step by step. Sugar Beats adds rhythm to the space through playful drumming on circular surfaces shaped like oversized sugar beets, creating the energetic heartbeat of the climb. Rocket Launch brings propulsion into the mix, letting visitors test how much force they can generate to send rockets climbing through clear vertical tubes marked with milestones from Earth to Mars.

Overhead, the Cloud Cannon completes the journey skyward as bursts of air create shimmering ripples across a suspended cloud sculpture, connecting the climber’s physical ascent with the movement of wind and weather above. Together, these experiences form a landscape of rising motion: a place where children explore how things grow, lift, ripple, launch, and respond, just as they do when they climb.

The Grow Climber is more than a climbing structure. It’s a story of courage unfolding in real time. It’s a place where children test their abilities, discover new strengths, and learn to trust themselves. Every pathway, net, platform, and embedded regional activity is designed to support the way kids grow through movement, challenge, exploration, and joy.

The Grow Climber is also a STEAM experience, blending physical play with science, engineering, and art. As children experiment with balance, height, and responsive materials, they’re engaging in early engineering thinking, adjusting, problem solving, and exploring concepts like force, motion, light, and pattern through hands on discovery. The responsive nets, shifting perspectives, and interactive Sun Dial introduce concepts like force, motion, light, and pattern, turning active play into hands on discovery.

The Grow Climber is the Grand Forks Children's Museum’s vertical heartbeat. It’s a soaring invitation to reach, climb, and discover what’s possible.