The day before the trip, all hell has not broken loose. Everything’s tidily packed in my trunk, sans broken camera. A quick stop at the Target next to the office nets me the last few supplies I need - plastic baggies for airport security, mostly.

After a quick rendezvous with the rest of my immediate travel group, we checked in and somehow managed to get through the TSA Gauntlet without losing the Rubber-Glove Lottery. Once on-board, it dawns on us that our whole travel group takes up, easily, half the 767. Duty-free liquor is, naturally, broken out upon take-off and when the stewardess announces that everyone’s getting a free round courtesy of Delta, the cheers were deafening.

After a purely perfunctory dinner - even international airline food leaves something to be desired - I dosed myself up with melatonin, hoping to catch forty winks and be fresh for a morning in the British Isles. Sadly, coach is incredibly un-conducive to somnolent endeavors, particularly with a beverage cart jolting me awake every hour by slamming into my knee.

Still, earplugs and willpower made for at least twenty-three winks over the North Atlantic.

Just my luck. Three days out from the Morocco stop on the Men From Sky World Tour and I discover that my trusty old digital camera has gone kaput. Oh, it still works, sure, but every photo is almost entirely white. It doesn’t seem to be a configuration or software problem, either. I imagine the CCD got damaged somewhere in the last few weeks of travel.

Sigh. I’ve not enough cash on hand to comfortably go out and buy a new one either, so I’ll be at the mercy of my traveling companions for photographic evidence of our misadventures.

At least I now have a better excuse for not doing any more photojournalism of Georgia.

Late last night, after a delicious dining experience involving beer and sausages, I headed out with a climbing companion to Adrenaline Climbing, way the hell out in Suwanee, northeast of Atlanta. This was my last, best hope for peace finding a decent rock gym in the area, and some folks had talked it up. Hopes were high.

Despite the lengthy drive, Adrenaline was situated in a shiny office park not too far off Interstate 85. When we arrived, the gym was nearly empty. In fact, were it not for the brightly-lit, flashing LED “Open” sign, I probably would have turned the car around instead of stopping. This was good, though, as a nice empty gym lets you explore the available features, unharried and at your own pace.

Adrenaline demands $14 for a day pass on a weekday, and $16 on a weekend. A decent decision, although I’ll probably limit my weekend visits. The slight disparity in price implies quite a bit of overcrowding. The gym does not, however, have lockers of any sort. Two unisex restrooms double as changing areas. Fortunately, with so few people around, I didn’t mind leaving my stuff beside the rough-worn overstuffed couch near the front of the gym.

The gym itself is a converted warehouse, far longer than it is wide. It’s probably about thirty or thirty-five paces across the short way, and easily double or triple that the long way. At the fore of the gym is a large, bulky, flat-topped wide arch. This is the gym’s bouldering feature and it goes up much higher than any other bouldering surface I’ve encountered. I’d guess it was a good 15 feet tall.

The bouldering routes are well-maintained and clearly taped; in fact, they go a step further than I expect and color-coded the route tape by difficulty. This makes locating appropriate routes much easier and is a feature I wish other gyms would adopt. The difficulties range from V0 through about V6, with a VB rank for beginners. There may be higher ranks - I wasn’t checking closely for them. Many of the routes seemed a bit sparse on feet, at least compared to what I’m used to. The bouldering feature is a “top-out” feature, meaning one is supposed to climb up onto the finished upper surface instead of merely grabbing a finish rock or zone. It’s an interesting variation that I haven’t encountered before.

Interestingly, the routes seem to be ranked a little lower than I would expect. There were a number of V1s that gave me considerable trouble, and most of the V2s I found myself incapable of completing. I also noticed that the routes had longer reaches and more dynos than I would expect for the routes I tried. One V1 was particularly notable; a middling V1 climb up to a pair of slightly-negative knobby holds, with the final hold being essentially a half-sphere the size of a golf ball. That final hold is also placed far far beyond my reach - a good four to six inches beyond - and there’s no good feet much above ankle level, aside from the two knob-holds, which are your only support at that point. Conceivably, I could mantle up on those holds and do some kind of crazy gymnastics balancing to get a foot onto one, but I never quite managed it.

The rest of the gym is split between top-roping and sport-leading surfaces. The walls had a good spread of routes between 5.7 and 5.12, and also had a decent amount of features built onto them. I’d like to give them a shot, once I get a belay partner.

Recommendation: Climb it. All in all, a good value, despite the drive. I’ll probably be making this place my regular location while I’m in Atlanta.

HOT4GOD

I know I’m in the South, but that’s something I honestly never expected to see.

For my first after-work climbing experience, I led a group of relative novices deep into the heart of downtown Atlanta, seeking the warehouse dubbed “Atlanta Rocks! In-town.” It’s conveniently located for me, about 15-20 minutes by car along routes that aren’t terribly clogged with traffic. After some interesting automotive gymnastics, so as to avoid taking four vehicles in the place of one, we shot down the I-85 and pulled into an business park. Atlanta Rocks! is a tall warehouse amidst a number of low-slung industrial buildings, identifiable by the full parking lot and giant neon sign.

Inside, it’s a decently-sized gym, certainly well over 10,000 square feet of climbing space. However, they only utilize two out of the four walls, and there’s nothing really built out far from a wall. There’s a bouldering arch set in the middle of the climbing area, and a small caving alcove built within the facade of a top-roping section.

Signing in was simple - waiver, clipboard, pen, write down the usual info, pay the $15 day pass fee. A complimentary belay test was offered and refused - today was a bouldering day, as my companions were not entirely confident in their belaying skills. Fair enough. The locker room was simple, clean and professional. Standard sets of 12 double-height lockers on each side of a small room.

The climbing floor itself is surrounded by a tall lip, which serves both as impromptu seating and to keep the gym’s padding contained. This gym uses an unusual variety of padding, which I’ve only heard of once before, from Mundy up in Seattle. It’s essentially black rubber chips, the same general size and shape as woodchips, piled several inches deep. It works pretty well, although it has the nasty tendency of flying into your chalk bag if you’re not careful.

The bouldering arch is where we started. As is becoming an unfortunate trend here in Atlanta, there are no formal routes marked on the arch itself. Like Wall Crawler, there are a bunch on unranked traverses marked with numbered tape. Aside from that, there’s no tape or other markings on the rocks themselves at all.

Undeterred, I introduced the climbing group to Add-On, which went fairly well. I had to take special care to not be an asshole, but there were sufficiently good holds and feet to make the routes we created generally accessible to all. Some impromptu general clambering around also made for a good workout. The rocks and backing were in excellent shape; I was rather surprised at how well-cleaned the rocks themselves were. Almost chalk-free, really.

I decided to try the caving alcove next. I personally hadn’t used one before; it’s somewhat similar to the extreme overhang sections and arches on a normal bouldering area, but you can get damn near horizonal and almost always have a wall on one side of you to push off of. I managed to clamber from the far, low end of the cave to the entrance. Given that overhang work is my weak spot, I felt pretty accomplished for having done it.

Overall, I enjoyed Atlanta Rocks! In-town, but the lack of taped bouldering routes was disappointing. There’s one more gym in the area I intend on trying before settling into a membership. If I can get some folks belay-certified, then AR could be a decent option.

Recommendation: Visit it. If you’re all about boulders, this is probably not the best place unless you play a lot of Add-On or like making up your own routes. The top-ropes looked pretty good and they had a cool top-ropable “naturals column” that was almost entirely made of sculpted features.

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.

Tomorrow I depart sunny Los Angeles for stormy Atlanta, and once there I get to finally start working again. Ten weeks “off” was nice and all, but after the first two or three without much to do, I get fidgety. I doubt the hotel I’ll be staying in, for the first few days at least, will have decent net access, so this could be the last update until later this week.

I’ll try to start taking some photos when I get over to Georgia, too. There has to be something interesting to see in the area. Right, guys? Right?

Going to the South, though, is a little weird. It’s the one region of the US I’ve never actually set foot in, which means visiting will be cool, but it also means all I have to go on right now are a raft of more-than-likely unfair stereotypes. But I do like cornbread, so it’s got that going for it.