7 ms·

The belay test and the modern American climbing gym

155 points by vasco 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
packetlost 2y ago
My family has a unique history with the climbing gym boom of the 90s. In the early to mid 90s my dad was operating a "co-op" called "The Barn" between Madison, WI and Dodgeville, WI. It was literally a retired barn that he had built climbing walls and a small apartment for himself to live in. I guess he eventually got in trouble with the authorities or something because it had to go away (likely code related, but I'm not sure), but he and some of the members ended up founding a legitimate business that stands to this day: Boulders Climbing Gym in Madison. He ended up leaving the business around the time I was born in 1997, but was still somewhat involved for a good chunk of my childhood. The parts about the belay test are burned into my brain as a result. I had no idea that the industry had its roots in Silicon Valley!
- mdberkey 2y ago
  Never thought I'd see Boulders Climbing Gym mentioned on HN! I loved going to the downtown location as a college student and everyone I met there was so nice and helpful.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    Yeah, it's a pretty awesome place! I didn't expect anyone here to have ever heard of it either!
- quasse 2y ago
  Wow, what a cool piece of Madison history. I spent a lot of afternoons at Boulders in the mid-2010s but never knew that it had a predecessor like that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mordechai9000 2y ago
“I had some really good, famous, climbers come in and fail the belay test,” Climbers still complain about the belay test, especially older climbers who cut their teeth outdoors and same late to the gym scene. But most gym accidents involving top roping or lead climbing are going to come down to a failed safety check or a mistake on the part of the belayer. And a failed safety check is at least partially a belayer failure. Experience level doesn't necessarily correlate with safe technique. Beginners can be highly conscious of the consequences of a fall, where more experienced climbers can get complacent and sloppy when the negative consequences fail to materialize. For example: the coach of an internationally competitive athlete dropped his climber on a grigri because he was casually chatting with someone on the ground and failed to control the brake strand. https://youtu.be/WBGkKqLhM8Y?si=p58XDsgOG5O2dbJP https://youtu.be/WBGkKqLhM8Y?si=p58XDsgOG5O2dbJP
- edf825 2y ago
  > more experienced climbers can get complacent and sloppy when the negative consequences fail to materialize. This effect in some fields is called "Normalisation of Deviance". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
- deepsun 2y ago
  It was even worse, the coach held grigri totally wrong the whole time, it would fail even if he wasn't chatting and concentrated on his climber.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I indoor climb with a friend semi regularly using a grigri, and it is important to be intentional about giving the climber your full attention and never taking your hand off the rope entirely [1]. Very similar to how the person qualifying you during a check ride for your private pilot certification will attempt to distract you on a final approach to see if you take the bait. If you don't want to or can't pay attention, that's what the auto belay [2] is for. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxY-BBSlGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxY-BBSlGc [2] https://www.verticalendeavors.com/auto-belays-pros-and-cons/ https://www.verticalendeavors.com/auto-belays-pros-and-cons/ (my climbing venue monitors and scolds you if you aren't paying attention while belaying, ymmv)
Fricken 2y ago
A Entreprises wall went up at the University of Alberta in 1989, which was pretty early for North American indoor walls. The Verdon Gorge was the hot shit place to climb at the time, and the Entreprises (a french company) wall textures and holds emulated the small technical limestone features that are commonly found there. I wasn't allowed to climb there until I was 16. I cut my teeth as a climber traversing back and forth on a cobbled bridge abutment local climbers would train on before the U of A wall went up. The second Gym to open in my home city, Vertically inclined, in 1994, was designed by Christian Griffith. It is still in operation today. Griffith also designed my original chalkbag, which I bought with allowance money and still have. I'm sentimental about that chalkbag. Around that time a local climber was dabbling around with hold making and went on to found Teknick climbing hold company, which set off a trend towards the big fat holds you see in climbing gyms today. Teknik is now a venerable old company and the second biggest supplier of holds in the world. He was a way better climber than me back then, and he still is.
- mc3301 2y ago
  Whoa, (indoor) climbing seems to have a rich history in Edmonton, and I had no idea.
egl2020 2y ago
I took a belay test in 1970 to qualify to climb with my school's outing club. We used a concrete weight and a hip belay.
- lukeinator42 2y ago
  absolutely legendary. Like they would throw a concrete weight off the top of the wall, and you would catch it with a hip belay?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Talk about ow!
  - egl2020 2y ago
    We hoisted the weight way overhead in the field house on a pulley system. One pulley was for the hoist, and another simulated the anchor point that the leader was falling past. The weight was held by a releasable clamp, and when release was triggered, you got a simulated leader fall: lots of slack and lots of potential energy. The rope burn eventually healed...
drcode 2y ago
PSA: Most modern gyms have "autobelay" devices that let you climb on your own without a partner. This makes gym climbing a super fun and accessible exercise anyone, even beginners, can do by just showing up to a gym at your convenience. (If you're a beginner you should still take the 1 hour class first and you will have to pass a belay test. And yes, if you can make the schedule work out with a friend so can belay each other, that's even more fun)
- lazide 2y ago
  Unfortunately, auto belays are also pretty terrible once you’re familiar with climbing - they pull on you and make harder climbing extremely awkward.
  - jajko 2y ago
    They lower the grade by cca 1 level by pulling you up, at least till 6a/6b in french scale. In higher levels I can imagine they also interfere with careful balance and body weight shifting training you away from actual skills, thats why I never saw them on anything harder than maybe 7b and even there it was like 1 or 2 routes in whole gym. But for easy grades and cca beginners, if you lack a good partner for whatever reason, they are great IMHO.
    - toxik 2y ago
      The pull of an autobelay is negligible, surely. The cable is a bit annoying perhaps but the real problem is that the wall is like near vertical, completely flat. Super uninspiring in my opinion.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Most climbing gyms put auto belays only on flat or slabby ‘beginniner’ areas of the walls because most people using auto belays can’t do much on harder stuff - and also it’s kind of convenient to have your partner ‘take’/hold you on steep stuff sometimes. Having uncontrolled (but slow) descents onto people’s heads probably also doesn’t help.
nepthar 2y ago
Is there really such a large crossover that climbing.com makes it to hacker news? Sure, this is interesting, but I love that this site is focused on tech.
- airstrike 2y ago
  "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The headline is about the guy who created new procedures and standardization. Those are certainly technologies by many definitions. The article talks about how he created a lot of what we consider the modern climbing gym. Fitness innovations are also a form of technology. Hacker news never claimed to be exclusively about digital technology, or electronic technology. This is an article telling the story of someone passionate about creating something new and innovative. Seems pretty aligned to me?
- ics 2y ago
  Anecdotally the climbing gym is the only semi-public place in which I've walked past someone browsing HN; without material stats I would still guess developers and people in tech vastly outnumber other fields among climbing gym members.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Planet Granite Sunnyvale was my haunt when I lived in CA. Almost everybody it seemed were wearing tshirts with the same logos you see driving down 101, in those days (10 years ago before that was uncool).
- sampton 2y ago
  Climbing, especially bouldering, requires solo problem solving. It’s the closest thing to coding in athletic terms.
thirtywatt 2y ago
>I got no positive reaction from the [climbing] industry at all This was my experience trying to create a climbing tech product in the last few years. The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. This is very interesting, since many climbers work in forward-thinking tech companies. Companies often resist growth to stay small. There are dirty secrets and bad blood among many competitors. Amazing sport, hard fought market.
- normie3000 2y ago
  > The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. This is very interesting, since many climbers work in forward-thinking tech companies. Maybe moving fast and breaking things is not always appropriate.
- ehnto 2y ago
  > The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. Every climber I meet is lovely, but there is your standard sports equipment elitism at play as well, not to be confused with the very real brand loyalism that comes out of trusting something with your life. I think if you are bringing a product into the climbing space you would do well to lead with a low risk product for brand reputation, something like a hangboard or training equipment perhaps.
MarcelOlsz 2y ago
If you're into this you should also check out Dan Iaboni from the parkour world. Started from a forum+fb group with a parkour gym built by the community in an old carpet factory, and now The Monkey Vault is in a massive factory in Toronto. Everyone thought he was crazy.
CephalopodMD 2y ago
Ohhhhhh. It just clicked for me that indoor climbing is from silicon valley and that's why the Venn diagram of tech bros and crag dirtbags overlays so much. I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average. But it's not a psychological quirk, it's a historical quirk!
- drahazar 2y ago
  > I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average. You were right the first time. Climbing is a largely constrained problem solving exercise with binary outcomes (you either did the route or didn't) and a built-in level-up style progression in the grading system. (Today I did my fist V2! etc...) You can do it entirely on your own, at your own time, in your own pace and it's not really possible to "lose" at climbing[1], you get unlimited attempts to try and figure it out. You can, for outdoor climbs, try the climb, fail, train for 6 months and retry the climb to succeed. In short it's almost designed to be addictive to coder types, but all that came before the indoor walls, not after. Source: I climb obsessively. They got me good. [1] - competition climbing aside, obviously
  - normie3000 2y ago
    > competition climbing aside, obviously You can add free soloing to the list as well.
dgfitz 2y ago
I was top-roping in a gym once, about 40 ft up, my belayer said “one sec” so I stopped and looked down, they had __unhooked__ their belay device, fucked with it for a bit, and reconnected it. I downclimbed, not the route just whatever holds were easiest, and left. I’d known this person for a few months and was convinced they knew basic safety. I was always kind of anal about safety, with everyone, so it wasn’t a vibe I was giving off. That was my last time on a rope. Strictly bouldering now.
- scottlamb 2y ago
  Terrifying! * Duh, you don't stop belaying mid-climb. * And why? Was it because something was uncomfortable (and somehow they thought fixing that was more important than your safety?) or because they suddenly thought the belay device was...not clipped into the harness right to begin with or something? Was it right when you cross-checked them prior to climbing? * And in saying "one sec" rather than a clear "belay off", they were minimizing the event at additional risk to you. No integrity there. I guess the only good thing I can say is that even if the belay device wasn't clipped into the harness, as long as the rope was wound through it properly, someone could still yank on the brake side and stop you. But obviously not take slack as you continued to climb, and from what you're describing I doubt they had their hand on the brake side as they futzed with the harness or whatever. So pretty weak comfort overall. I had the opposite experience once: while climbing in a park, my belayer sung a song that went something like "you're off belay, you're off belay, if you fall and die it's not my fault because you're off belay". I was pissed but what you're describing is a million times worse. My belayer was clearly being a dick but not so much that he actually stopped belaying and risked my life. Lyrics aside, he always used correct technique from pre checks through the whole climb, had practiced stopping someone from the ground if they lost their grip while repelling, came with a thoughtfully stocked first-aid kit, set up the climb properly with redundant webbing at the top, etc.
  - St00ge 2y ago
    [flagged]
- highstep 2y ago
necubi 2y ago
Interesting article! I climb at Berkeley Ironworks which is the successor to City Rock, but didn't know all of the history. The story ends in 2000 when Ironworks "represented the next generation of climbing gyms", but the trends have continued. IW is now old and grungy (I say as a complement) compared to the modern gyms targeted towards even more casual users.
- jerlam 2y ago
  "Old and grungy" they may be, but Touchstone seems to be doing well enough to expand dramatically. They've got a dozen+ locations.
decimalenough 2y ago
For any other non-climbers wondering what exactly "the belay test" is: https://climb-va.com/gettingstarted/belay-certification/ https://climb-va.com/gettingstarted/belay-certification/
- gs17 2y ago
  It's worth noting that (AFAIK) it's not a standardized test. The gym I go to doesn't let you tie your own knots on topropes and they're already inserted into a Grigri (not sure what the lead climbers use, but that's separate).
exabrial 2y ago
Holy macro, Safari Developers, please bring back the "disable javascript" shortcut in the develop menu for sites like this. You literally _cannot_ make the obnoxious video player go away because they are hijacking right click. It should not be this difficult to disable code execution.
marsten 2y ago
I got my start climbing at City Rock in the mid 90s when I was in grad school at Berkeley. It was a great place and really defined the model that other climbing gyms copied and built upon. Peter would also show up at Indian Rock sometimes, a popular outdoor climbing spot in Berkeley. He was an incredibly good climber and a friendly guy to boot. It took me a fair number of years to realize that the outgoing guy at Indian Rock was actually the founder of City Rock! He's one of those who seems to get a lot of satisfaction from building something cool and inspiring people, without much regard for money and traditional status. We could use more people like that.

155 points by vasco 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

My family has a unique history with the climbing gym boom of the 90s. In the early to mid 90s my dad was operating a "co-op" called "The Barn" between Madison, WI and Dodgeville, WI. It was literally a retired barn that he had built climbing walls and a small apartment for himself to live in. I guess he eventually got in trouble with the authorities or something because it had to go away (likely code related, but I'm not sure), but he and some of the members ended up founding a legitimate business that stands to this day: Boulders Climbing Gym in Madison. He ended up leaving the business around the time I was born in 1997, but was still somewhat involved for a good chunk of my childhood. The parts about the belay test are burned into my brain as a result. I had no idea that the industry had its roots in Silicon Valley!

mdberkey 2y ago
Never thought I'd see Boulders Climbing Gym mentioned on HN! I loved going to the downtown location as a college student and everyone I met there was so nice and helpful.
- packetlost 2y ago
  Yeah, it's a pretty awesome place! I didn't expect anyone here to have ever heard of it either!
quasse 2y ago
Wow, what a cool piece of Madison history. I spent a lot of afternoons at Boulders in the mid-2010s but never knew that it had a predecessor like that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mordechai9000 2y ago

“I had some really good, famous, climbers come in and fail the belay test,” Climbers still complain about the belay test, especially older climbers who cut their teeth outdoors and same late to the gym scene. But most gym accidents involving top roping or lead climbing are going to come down to a failed safety check or a mistake on the part of the belayer. And a failed safety check is at least partially a belayer failure. Experience level doesn't necessarily correlate with safe technique. Beginners can be highly conscious of the consequences of a fall, where more experienced climbers can get complacent and sloppy when the negative consequences fail to materialize. For example: the coach of an internationally competitive athlete dropped his climber on a grigri because he was casually chatting with someone on the ground and failed to control the brake strand. https://youtu.be/WBGkKqLhM8Y?si=p58XDsgOG5O2dbJP https://youtu.be/WBGkKqLhM8Y?si=p58XDsgOG5O2dbJP

edf825 2y ago
> more experienced climbers can get complacent and sloppy when the negative consequences fail to materialize. This effect in some fields is called "Normalisation of Deviance". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
deepsun 2y ago
It was even worse, the coach held grigri totally wrong the whole time, it would fail even if he wasn't chatting and concentrated on his climber.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
I indoor climb with a friend semi regularly using a grigri, and it is important to be intentional about giving the climber your full attention and never taking your hand off the rope entirely [1]. Very similar to how the person qualifying you during a check ride for your private pilot certification will attempt to distract you on a final approach to see if you take the bait. If you don't want to or can't pay attention, that's what the auto belay [2] is for. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxY-BBSlGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxY-BBSlGc [2] https://www.verticalendeavors.com/auto-belays-pros-and-cons/ https://www.verticalendeavors.com/auto-belays-pros-and-cons/ (my climbing venue monitors and scolds you if you aren't paying attention while belaying, ymmv)

Fricken 2y ago

A Entreprises wall went up at the University of Alberta in 1989, which was pretty early for North American indoor walls. The Verdon Gorge was the hot shit place to climb at the time, and the Entreprises (a french company) wall textures and holds emulated the small technical limestone features that are commonly found there. I wasn't allowed to climb there until I was 16. I cut my teeth as a climber traversing back and forth on a cobbled bridge abutment local climbers would train on before the U of A wall went up. The second Gym to open in my home city, Vertically inclined, in 1994, was designed by Christian Griffith. It is still in operation today. Griffith also designed my original chalkbag, which I bought with allowance money and still have. I'm sentimental about that chalkbag. Around that time a local climber was dabbling around with hold making and went on to found Teknick climbing hold company, which set off a trend towards the big fat holds you see in climbing gyms today. Teknik is now a venerable old company and the second biggest supplier of holds in the world. He was a way better climber than me back then, and he still is.

mc3301 2y ago
Whoa, (indoor) climbing seems to have a rich history in Edmonton, and I had no idea.

egl2020 2y ago

I took a belay test in 1970 to qualify to climb with my school's outing club. We used a concrete weight and a hip belay.

lukeinator42 2y ago
absolutely legendary. Like they would throw a concrete weight off the top of the wall, and you would catch it with a hip belay?
- lazide 2y ago
  Talk about ow!
- egl2020 2y ago
  We hoisted the weight way overhead in the field house on a pulley system. One pulley was for the hoist, and another simulated the anchor point that the leader was falling past. The weight was held by a releasable clamp, and when release was triggered, you got a simulated leader fall: lots of slack and lots of potential energy. The rope burn eventually healed...

drcode 2y ago

PSA: Most modern gyms have "autobelay" devices that let you climb on your own without a partner. This makes gym climbing a super fun and accessible exercise anyone, even beginners, can do by just showing up to a gym at your convenience. (If you're a beginner you should still take the 1 hour class first and you will have to pass a belay test. And yes, if you can make the schedule work out with a friend so can belay each other, that's even more fun)

lazide 2y ago
Unfortunately, auto belays are also pretty terrible once you’re familiar with climbing - they pull on you and make harder climbing extremely awkward.
- jajko 2y ago
  They lower the grade by cca 1 level by pulling you up, at least till 6a/6b in french scale. In higher levels I can imagine they also interfere with careful balance and body weight shifting training you away from actual skills, thats why I never saw them on anything harder than maybe 7b and even there it was like 1 or 2 routes in whole gym. But for easy grades and cca beginners, if you lack a good partner for whatever reason, they are great IMHO.
  - toxik 2y ago
    The pull of an autobelay is negligible, surely. The cable is a bit annoying perhaps but the real problem is that the wall is like near vertical, completely flat. Super uninspiring in my opinion.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Most climbing gyms put auto belays only on flat or slabby ‘beginniner’ areas of the walls because most people using auto belays can’t do much on harder stuff - and also it’s kind of convenient to have your partner ‘take’/hold you on steep stuff sometimes. Having uncontrolled (but slow) descents onto people’s heads probably also doesn’t help.

nepthar 2y ago

Is there really such a large crossover that climbing.com makes it to hacker news? Sure, this is interesting, but I love that this site is focused on tech.

airstrike 2y ago
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dghlsakjg 2y ago
The headline is about the guy who created new procedures and standardization. Those are certainly technologies by many definitions. The article talks about how he created a lot of what we consider the modern climbing gym. Fitness innovations are also a form of technology. Hacker news never claimed to be exclusively about digital technology, or electronic technology. This is an article telling the story of someone passionate about creating something new and innovative. Seems pretty aligned to me?
ics 2y ago
Anecdotally the climbing gym is the only semi-public place in which I've walked past someone browsing HN; without material stats I would still guess developers and people in tech vastly outnumber other fields among climbing gym members.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Planet Granite Sunnyvale was my haunt when I lived in CA. Almost everybody it seemed were wearing tshirts with the same logos you see driving down 101, in those days (10 years ago before that was uncool).
sampton 2y ago
Climbing, especially bouldering, requires solo problem solving. It’s the closest thing to coding in athletic terms.

thirtywatt 2y ago

>I got no positive reaction from the [climbing] industry at all This was my experience trying to create a climbing tech product in the last few years. The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. This is very interesting, since many climbers work in forward-thinking tech companies. Companies often resist growth to stay small. There are dirty secrets and bad blood among many competitors. Amazing sport, hard fought market.

normie3000 2y ago
> The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. This is very interesting, since many climbers work in forward-thinking tech companies. Maybe moving fast and breaking things is not always appropriate.
ehnto 2y ago
> The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. Every climber I meet is lovely, but there is your standard sports equipment elitism at play as well, not to be confused with the very real brand loyalism that comes out of trusting something with your life. I think if you are bringing a product into the climbing space you would do well to lead with a low risk product for brand reputation, something like a hangboard or training equipment perhaps.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago

If you're into this you should also check out Dan Iaboni from the parkour world. Started from a forum+fb group with a parkour gym built by the community in an old carpet factory, and now The Monkey Vault is in a massive factory in Toronto. Everyone thought he was crazy.

CephalopodMD 2y ago

Ohhhhhh. It just clicked for me that indoor climbing is from silicon valley and that's why the Venn diagram of tech bros and crag dirtbags overlays so much. I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average. But it's not a psychological quirk, it's a historical quirk!

drahazar 2y ago
> I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average. You were right the first time. Climbing is a largely constrained problem solving exercise with binary outcomes (you either did the route or didn't) and a built-in level-up style progression in the grading system. (Today I did my fist V2! etc...) You can do it entirely on your own, at your own time, in your own pace and it's not really possible to "lose" at climbing[1], you get unlimited attempts to try and figure it out. You can, for outdoor climbs, try the climb, fail, train for 6 months and retry the climb to succeed. In short it's almost designed to be addictive to coder types, but all that came before the indoor walls, not after. Source: I climb obsessively. They got me good. [1] - competition climbing aside, obviously
- normie3000 2y ago
  > competition climbing aside, obviously You can add free soloing to the list as well.

dgfitz 2y ago

I was top-roping in a gym once, about 40 ft up, my belayer said “one sec” so I stopped and looked down, they had __unhooked__ their belay device, fucked with it for a bit, and reconnected it. I downclimbed, not the route just whatever holds were easiest, and left. I’d known this person for a few months and was convinced they knew basic safety. I was always kind of anal about safety, with everyone, so it wasn’t a vibe I was giving off. That was my last time on a rope. Strictly bouldering now.

scottlamb 2y ago
Terrifying! * Duh, you don't stop belaying mid-climb. * And why? Was it because something was uncomfortable (and somehow they thought fixing that was more important than your safety?) or because they suddenly thought the belay device was...not clipped into the harness right to begin with or something? Was it right when you cross-checked them prior to climbing? * And in saying "one sec" rather than a clear "belay off", they were minimizing the event at additional risk to you. No integrity there. I guess the only good thing I can say is that even if the belay device wasn't clipped into the harness, as long as the rope was wound through it properly, someone could still yank on the brake side and stop you. But obviously not take slack as you continued to climb, and from what you're describing I doubt they had their hand on the brake side as they futzed with the harness or whatever. So pretty weak comfort overall. I had the opposite experience once: while climbing in a park, my belayer sung a song that went something like "you're off belay, you're off belay, if you fall and die it's not my fault because you're off belay". I was pissed but what you're describing is a million times worse. My belayer was clearly being a dick but not so much that he actually stopped belaying and risked my life. Lyrics aside, he always used correct technique from pre checks through the whole climb, had practiced stopping someone from the ground if they lost their grip while repelling, came with a thoughtfully stocked first-aid kit, set up the climb properly with redundant webbing at the top, etc.
- St00ge 2y ago
  [flagged]
highstep 2y ago

necubi 2y ago

Interesting article! I climb at Berkeley Ironworks which is the successor to City Rock, but didn't know all of the history. The story ends in 2000 when Ironworks "represented the next generation of climbing gyms", but the trends have continued. IW is now old and grungy (I say as a complement) compared to the modern gyms targeted towards even more casual users.

jerlam 2y ago
"Old and grungy" they may be, but Touchstone seems to be doing well enough to expand dramatically. They've got a dozen+ locations.

decimalenough 2y ago

For any other non-climbers wondering what exactly "the belay test" is: https://climb-va.com/gettingstarted/belay-certification/ https://climb-va.com/gettingstarted/belay-certification/

gs17 2y ago
It's worth noting that (AFAIK) it's not a standardized test. The gym I go to doesn't let you tie your own knots on topropes and they're already inserted into a Grigri (not sure what the lead climbers use, but that's separate).

exabrial 2y ago

Holy macro, Safari Developers, please bring back the "disable javascript" shortcut in the develop menu for sites like this. You literally _cannot_ make the obnoxious video player go away because they are hijacking right click. It should not be this difficult to disable code execution.

marsten 2y ago

I got my start climbing at City Rock in the mid 90s when I was in grad school at Berkeley. It was a great place and really defined the model that other climbing gyms copied and built upon. Peter would also show up at Indian Rock sometimes, a popular outdoor climbing spot in Berkeley. He was an incredibly good climber and a friendly guy to boot. It took me a fair number of years to realize that the outgoing guy at Indian Rock was actually the founder of City Rock! He's one of those who seems to get a lot of satisfaction from building something cool and inspiring people, without much regard for money and traditional status. We could use more people like that.