The next generation of climbing gyms is bigger, better, cooler, more professional... and it's changing the face of climbing as we know it

IN THE BEGINNING, there was only rock; no one climbed on plastic. Off-rock climbing training consisted of gymnastics-style strength exercises like pull-ups, front levers, and iron crosses. A few brave souls constructed homemade training apparati, most of which would sooner tweak a tendon or rip a flapper than up one’s climbing ability. Then, in the 1980s, people started to dream of ways to climb when it was too cold, wet, or dark to get out on rock. “My friends and I built a wall in a storage unit,” recalls Jeff Pederson, co-owner and manager of the Momentum Climbing Gym, in Sandy, Utah. “We got tired of starting over every spring, being out of shape.” In the winter, Pederson and his friends heated their storage-unit woody with a kerosene heater. “We’d climb in there until we were choking,” he recalls.

By the late 1980s, commercial climbing walls began to crop up around the United States, the first being Vertical World, in Seattle, Washington. Rich Johnston, a mountaineer and then litigation paralegal, opened Vertical World in 1987. The walls were short and there were no handholds — “They didn’t yet exist,” says Johnston. “We glued rocks on every surface. . . . It was basically a bouldering gym with ropes.”

When I started climbing, in the early 1990s in Ohio, the prevailing tech had progressed a bit — there were artificial climbing holds (Metolius, for example, the first in the US), but walls were still basically homemade affairs. My first taste of the vertical came in a tiny room with walls full of holds — it was run by the American Youth Hostels; middle-aged tradsters trained there to stay fit between trips to the Gunks. Soon, a commercial gym opened in town — the owner, with help from fellow climbers, built the 25-foot walls, mostly out of plywood and two-by-fours. The gym, still around today, has around 4,000 square feet of climbing surface.

The rock walls of my youth — like the original Vertical World, and many other 1980s and ‘90s-era gyms — were part of what the USAC routesetter and climbing wall consultant Chris Danielson calls “first generation generation” gyms, those “built by climbers, for climbers, without consideration to growth or serving diverse demographics,” he says. Such gyms can still be great places to climb, but they’re increasingly falling under the hulking shadows of next-generation gyms — facilities that are bigger, cleaner, better lit, in better locations, and designed and run to appeal to a changing and growing climbing demographic.

Chris Warner, a mountaineer and owner of the Earth Treks gyms and guiding service on the East Coast, is outspoken on the topic of old gyms coming up to speed. “Every gym out there is under threat,” he says, adding, “We opened our third gym a mile from a smaller, older one, forcing it to close.” Warner, along with many of today’s successful gym operators, climbing-wall builders, and other industry insiders interviewed for this article, all see the same trend well underway. “We’re going from the mom-and-pop era, to one of more sophisticated gym operators,” Warner explains. The upshot of these new, bleeding-edge gyms is that indoor climbing is becoming an entirely different experience, attracting entirely different clientele — this, in turn, is changing more than just indoor climbing; it’s changing climbing. Period.