I’ve been down here in Atlanta for less than a week, but as my hand has healed from the mistake that was ARC,
I was chomping at the bit to get back on some rocks. You know, see what The South could offer. After checking the canonical gym lists, the closest gym to my lodgings turned out to be the Wall Crawler Rock Club. I headed over shortly after they opened - noon on a Sunday.
I arrived at a nicely-painted building on the side of a minor highway, situated across the street from the commuter railway tracks in a mini-mall. The gym’s neighbors are, appropriately enough, a coffee shop and a chiropractor. The outside of the building is nicely painted with a huge sunset-themed mural.
Step inside and be greeted by… a cavernous open space, painted sky blue. Two of the walls have been set up for top-roping, one covering only half the length of the space, the other covering three-quarters. A bouldering cave, probably about fifteen to twenty paces on a side, is set up behind the front desk.
When I arrived, the gym was almost empty aside from a small group of four clustered in the back of the top-rope area. The attendant was in the shop, which is secluded, along with the locker rooms, in a hallway near the bouldering cave. Fifteen dollars later, I had a day pass. Curiously, the gym did not ask for a liability waiver. Oh well, just hope nothing gets broken I guess?
The locker room, which seems to also double as storage, is a spare affair. A simple metal stand of eight lockers has been plopped down in a bathroom, with an old desk and armchair provided for seating. I managed to snag a locker and change out. Now for the boulders!
The bouldering cave at Wall Crawler is a u-shaped affair, with a section of one U-leg forming a very low arch, and another high arch bridging the tips of the U. Rocks are affixed haphazardly along both the inner and outer sides of the U, save where it abuts the outer walls of the gym. Most rocks have been taped with some bizarre hybrid system - single-stripe, stripe-with-drawn-design, and stripe-with-substripe. Not too easy to read, but not as bad as ARC.
Unfortunately, reading the tape is less necessary than I’ve come to expect in most bouldering areas. While there’s a lot of tape strewn around, about half of it doesn’t seem attached to complete routes. Those complete routes that are taped aren’t always clearly marked with a difficulty rating. There’s also two long marathon bouldering sequences which are taped and numbered sequentially, forming long traversal chains that one is supposed to attempt. Curiously, they both seem to lack footholds leading me to assume they’re All-Feet routes. Still, marathon traverses are fun.
I must, however, protest this gym’s corruption of the difficulty scale. Some of my new coworkers warned me that the gym seemed to clump difficulty ratings together, and that the ratings themselves were not entirely consistent. Instead of the standard Vermin/Hueco “V0 and Up”, this gym has a rating system of “VB, VE, VM, VH, VS” - Beginner, Easy, Moderate, Hard, and “Sick.” I think I saw two VBs, one VE and four VMs.
I ended up spending my hour playing with parts of the mega-traverses, trying out a couple of the taped routes, and then improvising a bunch of stuff on the masses of orphaned rock. The VE I tried wasn’t too hard, but I didn’t manage to complete a VM. The feet seemed very lacking throughout, and a couple lacked feet altogether.
On the way out, I did pick up a nice cheap bottle of water (a single buck) - a pleasant change from back west. Still, I can’t really advise this gym for serious use - it’s too small to be worth the travel for the hardcore. It’s also definitely not for use by newer climbers, as my coworkers are, and the bouldering area seems poorly maintained. Perhaps the top-ropes were better.
Recommendation: Pass. If it were down the block, I’d use it as a casual neighborhood gym, but it’s not. If a climbing buddy from out of town came to visit, this certainly wouldn’t be one of our stops.
Tags: atlanta, georgia, gym reviews, reviews, rock climbing
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