Why aren’t climbing gyms hiring climbers?

I want to give a little bit of context to this blog post, I wrote this back when I was in my second year in College. At the time I was purely a rock climbing dirt bag. I was maybe around 20 or so years old at this point, and I had been working in climbing gyms for about 6 years of my life and climbing in them for about 15 years.

The climbing gym industry started moving through a change of character in my opinion (as is plainly stated in this article.) While I don’t necessarily disagree with my past self, since writing this piece I feel like I’ve soften on my harsh views. In the end gyms need employees to run the facility. I’ve also had the pleasure of working for Edgeworks climbing gym in Tacoma WA for about two years, while no gym is perfect I feel as though that gym had struck a good balance between the less experienced staff and the more experienced which gave a proper avenue for progression and learning about the most up-to-date techniques in the broader world of experienced mountain professionals.

This proved to me that a good model can be done for the sake of moving the profession forward from a place where parnets drop their kids off after school for “activites.”

I think climbing gyms are a great place and don’t hold any staff member accountable for anything, I feel it’s more on the gym management to help the staff learn more about climbing and proper techniques to teach the members taking their classes, or to lesser extents how to give a good top tope belay test.

In the end this article I wrote was mostly bringing to light what I’ve noticed in the climbing gym community about how every time someone was hired at the gym I worked at they seemed to move further away from the climber first, gym employee second to employee getting hired “now I should learn how to climb.” While intimate knowledge of climbing doesn’t really matter for selling memberships or checking people, it does make a difference when giving belay checks or teaching classes.

In the end I think this article is more about me venting frustrations I had (and maybe still do) about the climbing gym industry.

Why aren’t Climbing Gyms Hiring Climbers?

I’ve been climbing for about 15 years now, and like many people of my generation I started by climbing in a gym. When I was nine or ten years old, I told my mom that I didn’t want to play soccer anymore, no real reason, I just thought it was time for a change. I had been to my local climbing gym a few times before, and thought that that could be my new sport. I started climbing in the gym’s youth program, a group of kids ages 12-18 that would basically function as a “climbing club,” where you would make friends and climb the various routes in the gym and learn about climbing techniques, lingo, the systems, and build up a baseline climbing ability. During summers I would sign up for one or two summer camps where you would spend 8 hours a day in the gym for a couple of days before heading out to the wild crags of exit 32 and 38 to experience what climbing real rock was like! Always with the same instructors that wanted to introduce outdoor recreation to the next generation.

The instructors where the folks that made it worth going, in specific the person in charge of the entire program worked as a guide for a number of services around the area. This man was the epitome of psyched, and that would reflect in everything he did, this was why he was here and what he decided to dedicate his life too. On top of that he really took a liking to the kids in the program that had the desire to cast away from the gym and move onto outdoor climbing venues. As you may have guessed I was one of those kids, I would tell him about how I wanted be able to climb any mountain that I saw, I wanted to do ice climbing, rock climbing, alpine trickery, and even the mountaineering slogs. When comparing myself to the other kids in my program, you could say that I was in the minority, you can’t assume that in a 16-person group that everyone will have the same ambitions as you, and some kids where there just to get some exercise after school. However, for me and the few others that where psyched on getting out of the gym these instructors took us under their wings, and taught us all the necessary skills to start cragging on our own. It was a combination of the program curriculum and taking us aside to talk about the more advanced skills. In the program we would learn all the basics, like top rope belaying, how to tie your knot, lead climbing, and lead belaying. When the instructors had time, they would take us aside and we would learn the more advance skills like multipitch climbing systems. Eventually we had all the knowledge to go outside and climb sport multipitch routes on our own, and we did, as long as one of our parents could drive us to where we wanted to go.

The learning didn’t stop in the gym, eventually me and a few friends would go outside to climbing longer alpine routes in the cascades of Washington, rock routes, and even a snow route or two. These adventures did more than just teach us new skills but it harbored a love and a passion for being in the mountains and part of the climbing community. Eventually around college age that is when I personally became less of a “gym rat,” and more of a mountain adventurer, all thanks to the leadership and skill of these instructors of a climbing gym youth program.

When I was 14, I got hired onto the gym staff, mainly being a belay slave at parties and belay sessions for folks that are just trying climbing for the first time. My program instructors were still there helping me get the hang of how to work with first time climbers, offering feedback and different tricks to employ. As I got older, I progressed to teaching the same youth programs that I was once a part of, first working with the younger kids, then eventually the older kid groups. I was teaching kids how to top rope belay and tie their knots, then a year or two later I was teaching kids how to lead climb and lead belay. Eventually I started teaching the adult programs as well, every class that the gym offered I could teach, and I was very happy with how far I had come. I worked in that same gym until I was out of college, at least for eight years, and in that time, I noticed many changes in both the climbing community and the gym operations. The biggest on being that the very same climbing company that I’ve been working for all this time started to hire less and less climbers.

First thing I should do is explain what I mean by “climbers,” since this is a very hot topic in the climbing community of what a “real climber” is. What I mean is people that haven’t really climbed a lot before being hired, it’s not uncommon for a new employee to take a belay test after being hired, especially if they came from out of the area for the job. Usually this would be a standard belay test, and a lead test, most new applicants learned how to top rope belay from a different place. Many new employees had never learned how to lead climb or lead belay. Some didn’t even know about that style of climbing! I understand that everyone starts somewhere and climbing gym staff is an entry level outdoor position, but why would management choose a person that doesn’t know what lead climbing is over a long-time climber that has been climbing for years?

The answer is a lot more standard than one may think, it’s because “real climbers,” are always thinking about their next climbing trip to Bishop, or Squamish, they usually have kept their expenses small so they can go on a few trips a year for climbing. Working an hourly wage at a climbing gym is a really good set up for them, because they can request a lot of un-paid time off and work at a place with climbers to talk to, they can find partners there on the off season, and it’s a place to train with a free membership! Also, on the gym’s side of things is they have a more experienced and knowledgeable staff, what is the problem here? The problem is that as climbing gyms get more popular and the demand gets higher, the climbing gym world is becoming more and more corporate. I’ve been seeing this in the gym industry for the past three to four years, movies like Valley Uprising, Free Solo, and the Dawn Wall are exposing people to climbing on a mass scale. They want to try it out for themselves so they go to the only place that they can get to feel what it’s like, so they head off to the local climbing gym. With more and more people coming into the climbing gyms that need waivers, day passes, shoe rental, and the usual orientation talk, the more people you need to be able to deliver those services. Thus, the more employees you need to work at the climbing gym, and therefore you need more employees, and beggars can’t be choosers. That’s not to mention the demand for more places in youth programs, and classes, more people want memberships, and every gym nowadays has a youth team that needs to practice! Some gyms in really popular areas can see close to 800 check-ins on the busiest days during peak hours! No wonder why the gyms are taking who they can get!

So, we have a huge demand for workers in a growing market, why not hire some long-time members or people that have had some prior experience with climbing or climbing gyms? The bottom line is climbers just don’t make good workers, they always want to take time off for trips, and usually aren’t super dedicated to the job that they’re working. The gym therefore, is going to hire the regular nine to fivers, the people with responsibilities like a home and a car and a need for steady income. It used to be that many people would get jobs at climbing gyms for a season to train and get some money before the next round for dirtbagging. I’ve even tried to get some seasonal work from a gym, but was turned down because the manager was “done hiring people that just come and go,” he wanted people that would stay for at least two or three years. In other words, he wanted people that didn’t travel around climbing, he wanted folks that would be happy being a gym climber in the same place for years. This is very understandable from a management position, the gym industry is one that has massive turnover, I saw it a lot back when I was full time at my gym.

It’s sad to see the lack of experience from gym staff whenever I go to a new gym, people giving poor belay checks, and even worse lead checks, using equipment inappropriately, and having gym policy which is entirely to constricting for the staff and the climbers in the facility. Certain gyms are starting to implement a policy in which one can only pass a belay test if you are using the P-BUS method, even if you learn from a different gym or guide service a different belay method you will fail your test for not doing specifically P-BUS. Granted not all gyms are being this drastic, but more and more climbing gyms are starting to get more and more rule based rather than judgment based. We use these terms in mountain guiding a lot because there are always many different ways to handle a certain system, like belaying. However, because the gyms are hiring less and less experienced staff, they have to resort to the narrowest passing curriculum in order to ensure that the staff have the judgment to ensure that this person can belay in their gym. I refer to this as the: “climbing gym bubble,” when the gym is so lost within its own walls, that they lose sight of where their policy should lie and where judgment should begin. If you look at the other end of the spectrum like a guiding service, policy plays very little into day to day operations, the business does have some specific rules that should not be broken, but they rely more on the judgment of the guide to make most of the decision in regards to safety. This is mainly because mountain guides tend to have a lot of experience and external training by third parties, like the AMGA, AAI, and different wilderness medical organizations. Since climbing gyms are an entry level outdoor job, they usually have to hire people that don’t have a lot or any experience, so you have to use a system of rules/ guidelines for them to use as a guideline while giving belay tests, teaching classes, and other gym operations. When I worked in a gym I would often step into a more complicated or awkward belay or lead test to help out a lesser experienced staff member. They weren’t sure if the person should pass or not because they were a little shaky on clipping or clipped the anchors wrong, so I took over the test and used more experience based judgment, afterwards we would talk it over and I would tell them the reasons why I made the choice to pass or fail them.     

So, what’s the big deal, why does it matter that the people working in the gym don’t have any experience? When I was working in my gym, I could feel the sense of community was fading. All of our youth programs were being packed with as many kids as the management could handle, it was impossible to cultivate the sense of culture and community that the programs of early days had, I and the rest of the instructors where running around just trying to make sure the kids didn’t drop each other. Still, in the chaos of an overpacked undermanned program there were still a few kids that wanted to expand to climbing outside, and make the same steps that I myself had made in my early days of climbing. So, like my mentors before me I took those kids under my wing, and showed them how to handle sport anchors and how to get out of the gym to climb with themselves at the same crags that I had learned on. This was followed by being told by the management to stop, just because the kid wasn’t in the right age category, even though he was the exact same age that I was when I started climbing outside. The community and psyche have been replaced with cooperate business ideals, if the kid wants to learn about sport anchors make him take and pay for a separate class instead of using the same class that he’s already in every week. It sad to see the gym that I learned to climb in take such a U-turn, and is one of the main reasons why I’m not there anymore. I see this with plenty of other gyms too, by hiring staff that aren’t climbers the gyms will only continue down the road of not producing any real climbers. Instead they’ll provide an after-school activity to kids and an afterwork workout for adults. While there is nothing wrong with that, it just means that the few kids and adults that want to learn to go outside will have to find different mentors and the separation between the world of real climbing and gym climbing will grow ever larger.