Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
Start small—the tire shavings will do. A stand in for padding, they were outdated long before I first waded through them wide-eyed and eager. There’d be half-buried Band-Aids and strands of someone else’s hair among the piles. They were hard on the knees and they had a distinct smell. When the steam ran out, I couldn’t help but lie in the carnage. In the late aughts, I was a novice and a kid no wider than a beanpole, just scratching at something I had yet to make out. Black would get everywhere.
No A.C., no heat. Some climbing gyms were downright inhospitable. Holds were rarely washed or replaced, and the smell of chalk and feet hung in the air like a thick mist. The walls were shorter then and often shaped to imitate real rock, which meant built-in features and limited setting options. You went to the gym to train; plastic and plywood were a means to an end for those who had caught the bug, and there were far fewer of us then than now.
Gyms these days are so much shinier. So much cleaner. The fresh mats, the antiseptic lighting, the contentiously large holds, the dazzling expanses of wall, the rows of shit, the services for parents or remote workers or kids or socialites or wannabes or gurus or hippies or athletes, etc. The brightly current feel of the space. A lot has changed over the last 15 or so years. It’s easy to see that with this booming growth we’ve witnessed within the sport, there have been myriad advancements which stretch far beyond architectural improvements. Gyms have taken on a reality completely different from what was, and in doing so have become their own gestalt reflective of both current and longstanding cultural reverberations.
I’ll admit, it’s a little strange—that I have this grudge, this bone to pick with the way things are. I feel perhaps a tad young to be all back-in-my-day pearl clutching, and whatnot. I’m only 28, after all. But there it is, this unmistakable restlessness I feel when I enter a gym, like I just walked into a high school cafeteria. Like it would be weird to be lapping four-by-fours or making up circuits or doing doubles or even just letting a pssatt fly a little too loudly. Like it would be weird to even try hard. Like it’s not a place of training anymore. Like it’s not at all where you go if you want to climb hard outside. Identifying the feeling is the easy part; explaining why is much harder, especially given the inevitable accusations of gatekeeping, of being elitist, or even not recognizing the privilege I have always held as a white, straight, cis-gender woman who, to be frank, was strong out the gate. Fair enough. That’s not what this is about.
When I attended Colorado State University from 2013 to 2016, I made the hour-long trek from Fort Collins to Boulder or Denver to climb at one of the Movement Climbing Yoga and Fitness facilities two (sometimes three) times a week. Those gyms offered top-notch setting and terrain which ultimately prepared me both for winning Nationals and sending Zulu (5.14a) across a few weekend trips to Rifle. I moved away following graduation and didn’t return until 2019, sometime after the company was acquired by El Cap, the largest conglomerate of gyms in the country, and I was surprised by all of the changes.
The setting, for one, was (and remains) different—the density of sets was lower, the grades were inflated, and the complexity had decreased. The holds, particularly for a single color, all felt the same. Style of course, had changed too, with sets moving towards competition-inspired movement rather than the power or tension you’d need to climb outside. And the staff was no longer as friendly; my friend actually got yelled at by an employee who, from a distance, thought he was belaying incorrectly (he wasn’t). Overall, the distinctive feeling of the space had shifted: there was a lack of culture and focus, which, in my opinion, makes it feel like a general fitness and social facility rather than a place designed for intentional training and people who like intentional training. If I still lived in Fort Collins, I’d opt out of those hour-long drives.
But at the same time, gyms have become, for many, far more welcoming. “We are focused on creating a welcoming and inclusive environment,” says Jeremy Levitt, the current Chief Executive Officer of Movement. “We want everyone who walks through our doors to feel like they belong and have the support they need to achieve their goals.” To accomplish this, the gym partners with local organizations that focus on bringing traditionally underrepresented folks into our community. The gym’s focus on diversity and inclusion is apparent and seems to have made sizable strides in further diversifying our sport.
I spoke with Jamie Logan to get her take on the state of climbing gyms, since she’s been climbing almost twice as long as I’ve been alive and was the architect for Movement’s Boulder location. Just 12 years ago, Logan was likely the only publicly known trans climber in the United States. Before that, she was well-known as a pioneer in our sport, having put up a number of historic first ascents, including on Mt. Robson’s Emperor Face with Mugs Stump in 1978.
“I can go to the gym with lipstick, because it’s fun,” said Logan. “And nobody cares whether I do that or I don’t. We’re just going to go climbing, right?”
Later she added, “I think the younger people don’t know how far we’ve come,” which admittedly includes me.
Logan recalled a recent moment watching a National climbing competition that took place in Phoenix on YouTube. She wondered how many climbing gyms were in the area and was shocked after doing the Google search—there’s ten. “I was like, Wow. Climbing has changed! It’s kinda like going to Starbucks, you know?” she says.
Which is, of course, true. Even when I started climbing, gyms were rare. You were lucky if you had one in your city. Having two was unheard of. But they are now in every major city; in multiple corners of said cities. They’re no longer relegated to warehouse districts but have moved downtown, next to coffee shops and across from bars. In some places, so many gyms have gone up that the market is starting to be saturated.
Consider, for a moment, the social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s musings on the concept of simulacrum, which he defines as an evolution of the abstraction into its own reality so that the abstraction eventually becomes a distinct entity rather than a representation. It becomes original, or hyperreal, a stand in for the model itself. Indoor climbing is unmistakingly a simulacrum. Baudrillard went on to describe the inevitable “antecedence” of a simulacrum, such that the model eventually comes before its quintessential reality. At first, people went to climbing gyms to climb when the weather didn’t permit climbing outside. Later they went to gyms instead of going outside so that, when they did go back outside, they’d be stronger. But as climbing evolved, gyms became an end unto themselves; people began using gyms instead of venturing outside. Many never will.
This period of growth is a critical one. According to data collected by the Climbing Business Journal, there were 618 gyms in the United States in 2022, which is about three times more than in 2005. Zooming out, it’s no wonder we arrived here when you acknowledge that our sport, built by youthful outcasts and rebels, has continued to represent a reckoning with society. And boy have we done some reckoning in the last ten or so years. In a society that is more diverse than it has ever been, cultural focus has aimed steady at mass acceptance and unity amidst raging divisiveness and economic and social turmoil. We’ve seen concepts like gender continue to be post-modernized. We’ve seen a rise in grassroots activism—from Occupy Wall Street to #MeToo to Black Lives Matter—which has instigated questioning of old concepts and the redefining of new ones. The whole fervor is craving for something new, urban, and accessible to all. Climbing has always been progressive as a sport, but now it’s intentionally so. In this zeitgeist, the sport has become cool. All that is to say that it fits the vibes of the times, which has in turn fueled the growth.
According to historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, everything changed, at least in England, starting in the 18th century. They described the “slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts,” which began to spread from the wealthy elite to the non-rich. The desire for fashions, current trendy shiny things. Affluence. The whole wanting likely began much sooner, but regardless of its beginnings, we the people, who can buy $100 T-shirts or, scratch that, thousand-dollar handbags, or—try this one—rare coffee made from cat poop… we are drowning in it. And by it, I mean consumerism. Climbing, this thing that, for so many of us represents something artistic and spiritual, has become far more monetizable than it used to be. It is digestible. It’s something you take your friends or your date to. It’s something you can try one day and abandon the next.
To be clear: more people enjoying climbing is a good thing, but there is a difference between a dojo and Planet Fitness.
Although climbing is in some ways more diverse and accessible than ever, its financial barriers have ballooned. When I began climbing in 2007, a one-month membership cost roughly $30. Currently a monthly membership at Movement Climbing Yoga and Fitness is $95; at Central Rock Gym it’s $115; at Touchstone Climbing it’s $95. Most gyms have hiked their prices to cover rising costs and remain competitive and solvent. There’s increased construction costs, stringent building standards, an increased consumer expectation around cleanliness, setting cadence, amenities, and—the big one—increased cost of real estate. The price of building a single wall—not to mention a gym—has skyrocketed even since the pre-pandemic era.
The difference between Starbucks and gyms is that, in today’s changing market, gyms have less and less time to make a profit. “The lifespan of a gym is much shorter than it used to be because of the competitiveness of the marketplace,” says Timy Fairfield, a former pro climber and president of Futurist Climbing, which offers independent consulting and climbing wall design. (Fairfield, also the founder of Chalk Cartel, was the 1997 Bouldering World Cup winner in Celmancy, France, and, in the same year, he made the world’s first V11 flash with Future Eaters, in Switzerland.) “I think that will be a real crux for gym owners. It will come down to whether they can make enough money fast enough for the lifespan of the facility, which evidence suggests may be becoming about 12 years.”
Whereas climbing was a niche sport of soul seekers and dirtbags, it has transformed itself into a proper industry, and a gym’s survival hinges on its ability to keep up with what people think climbing is and how it should be presented. But not all the players really understand the game. “There’s a new wave of people coming into the industry who are primarily business-minded and secondarily identify as ‘climbers,’” says Fairfield. “We’ve had clients who’ve only been climbing for two to five years, the majority of whom are very recreational and driven by social motives.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a problem?” I asked. Gym owners need to know what the hell they’re doing, and why, because everything trickles down from there.
Ged Mac, a lifelong climber and the founder and CEO of The Climbing Hangar, a chain of gyms in the UK, spoke generally about what he’s witnessed in the business, and how money has factored in. “If you’ve got a board of VCs who have invested in climbing because it’s a growth industry, and they want to make money out of it in the short term, then that’s what they’ll do.” (Mac, for his part, has a team of VC’s backing his facilities, and the financial boost has allowed him to accomplish more with each facility.) “It needs a strong leadership team with a clear view on how to manage VC’s profit maximization objectives with preserving a valuable culture over the long term.”
Profitability and a long term communal investment can go hand and hand—both benefit from more people getting into the door and then, of course, coming back. Mac likened the business to that of video-game production, describing how, as an industry, gaming is about 15 years ahead of climbing. “At the beginning, gaming was for gamers,” he says. “They enjoyed it for its difficulty—games weren’t made to be accessible.” Now, of course, the industry has completely changed, and so has how games are made; they start easy—very easy—with micro progressions in difficulty. If you were to plot it on a graph, it would look flat for ages until rising exponentially. That curve, says Mac, is what his setters envision when setting at one of his facilities. He explained that most people want their first few experiences to feel… easy. No one really likes to get shut down.
Based on my experience, gyms everywhere, whether they know it or not, are using this same setting curve.
And what else would make the experience fun? Big holds? Yep. Soaring walls filled with surprisingly few (but beautifully colored) problems? Sure. Other amenities like a cafe bar or yoga studio? You betcha. All the obvious things we’ve been blaming even though, by themselves, they aren’t really the problem.
“I’ve had clients ask me to factor in the viability and cost of building swimming pools in their climbing gym to be able to offer deep-water bouldering/soloing,” says Fairfield, laughing. “Although it seems rather incompatible with most market demand and commercial operations, it certainly reflects the transformation of service offerings and what clients believe appeal to new customers. That’s an example of the excessiveness that we’re seeing.”
The term boondoggle didn’t become widespread until 1935, when the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, reported that the federal Works Progress Administration had spent more than a whopping $3 million (equivalent to about $66 million today) on training for unemployed workers that, strangely, included ballet and making boondoggles (small colorful keychains). People, as you can imagine, were outraged. The term boondoggle came to mean “an extravagant and useless project.”
Gym owners who want to profit on those slim margins, and within their shortened life spans, have found themselves in an arms race to have the shiniest facility that will introduce climbing to the biggest crowd. They make the facility extravagant. Anything you could possibly want, they’ll have it. They feed the hungry cycle. They hit copy, paste. Copy, paste. Copy, paste, propelling the “propulsive power of envy,” as McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb described in their book on consumerism. Why bank on artistry—something unique and creative—when you have a proven model? We have, I’d argue, entered the age of the boondoggle.
Such duplicative strategies are the most boring, the most offensive, to the people who care the most, which leads to higher turnover. That’s how you end up with people who have only been climbing a few months working behind the desk, or giving you your belay test, or setting the climbs that you’ve come here to climb, or owning the whole thing—it all perpetuates the cycle.
That’s not to say that everything is bad and doomed. VC-backed, amenity-rich gyms with young, psyched employees can be awesome. But the ingredients only work when mixed intentionally with a steady hand. I don’t want all gyms to be dingy training facilities open only to the select few; I want gyms to actually cater to everyone at every skill level with every kind of motivation, be it to find community or send something hard. I want facilities that maintain focus on climbing and getting better at climbing—not just pushing a consumable. I want the focus to be on long-term development. This all might sound like selfish cries coming from someone who clearly feels like they were pushed out of their home, but this isn’t just pressing for me. It impacts future generations, too. I hope anyone who falls head over heels for this sport will at least have options for what works best for them, especially when it’s so damn expensive just to get in the door.
“There’s a very delicate line between business and community, and they have to work together,” says Kai Lightner, pro climber and founder of the nonprofit Climbing 4 Change, which aims to promote diversity across the outdoor industry. “So businesses have to toe the line between: Yes, we’re a corporate entity, so the bottom line is to make money; but also, we’re part of a larger sporting community that needs to be taken care of.”
The last time I went to a major commercial facility, the hardest boulder was V9. Sure, there were LED boards that I could hop on, but the message, to me, was clear: Climbers who wish to train can go train in the corner; the rest of this facility isn’t for you. Ironic, given where we started. And I think back to my days when I first began: the sport was hard to get into, but I took inspiration from the mature climbers who ran circles around me on the wall. I wanted to be like them, and it was because I was able to witness that up close that I was motivated to keep trying. Everyone at every level benefits from exposure to hard grades (and to the dedication required to send those hard grades).
Lightner echoed my feelings: “I feel like a lot of times setting those harder climbs, or investing in the community and your talent is a long-term investment that people need to have a better perspective on, aside from just catering to the lowest common denominator.”
Modern gyms have obvious benefits, most notably their effort to become more inclusive and more accessible. But they are also worse for their lack of artist distinction. They have largely become repeatable business opportunities, a Starbucks iced vanilla latte. A picketed suburban house next to a picketed suburban house that is easily here one day and easily gone the next. They become a regenerated reality, a transposition of the sport.
My hope and my expectation is that we’re heading towards a future that offers both spirituality and recreation. I’m still waiting for the investor to realize their opportunity to create gyms across cities that aren’t exactly like all the other gyms in said cities. To create something simple and utilitarian and meant to last. To create something that fosters the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in climbing rather than just a fun way to kill a few hours.
Zoom out—past the padding, the walls, the holds, the ducting of the whole thing. Go past the facility itself and the street that modern gyms sit on. Look at the community, and where it’s headed. That’s why this matters. That’s the only reason why any of this has ever mattered.