Back when the sun was shining and the air was warm, the walls at the Cascade Crags climbing gym in Everett were as empty as the blue summer skies.
Once the rain arrived, though, the gym’s artificial rocks came alive with climbers keeping in shape, sharing stories from the summer and working on improving their skills so they can take on tougher rocks next year.
"The summer, it’s deaaaaad," said Tyler Miller, a coach with the gym’s youth team and a wintertime gym rat. "It’s definitely picked up the last three weeks."
Mike Palmer, the co-owner of the gym, said it’s like clockwork as soon as the weather changes.
"Especially that third week in September, when we had the cold weather, all of the sudden there were like 50 people in here," he said.
Some climbers work around the base of the gym’s 25-foot-high walls, traversing along hand and foot holds just a few feet above the floor. Others scurry up and down the various routes marked with colored duct tape. Still others gather in the bouldering area, where they work their way over overhanging obstacles, clinging upside down like geckos.
Mark Glidden, a member of Everett’s Mountain Rescue Unit, has some very practical reasons for spending time in the gym. With a sport as complicated and dangerous as rock climbing, keeping your skills up carries more weight than, say, downhill skiing. It’s not like riding a bike, he said.
"Pulling on the harness regularly, using the ropes regularly, tying the knots regularly, those are perishable skills," Glidden said.
"Last winter, I had a rescue where I had to get a kid off Big Four in the middle of the night. And I did that with confidence because I was in here working out."
All work and no play, though, is no formula for staying in shape. Evy Dudey started coming to the climbing gym to rehab a broken arm and stayed because it was a fun way to get a workout.
"It was the hardest thing I could think of doing and way more interesting than lifting little weights," she said. "Here, you get a feeling of accomplishment. There’s something for everybody and you don’t have to be a super climber. I was able to find my place and set personal challenges."
The beauty of climbing, said Jason Gunderson, the head coach of the youth team, is that there are so many similarities between climbing in the gym and on real rock.
"Climbing is more about your balance than it is your strength and power," he said. "Most people have not learned enough about their balance to go straight to working on their strength."
The outdoor season can be tough on climbers, Gunderson said, and it’s important to take things easy at the start of the winter.
"The thing that’s most important is to lay off the upper body, because the upper body gets really fatigued," he said. "Muscles develop 10 times faster than tendons do. After a season, you need to play a little catch up."
Cross training is a little trickier in climbing than in many sports, because so many of the muscles and movements are specific to rock climbing. That said, the old standby of cross country skiing is good. Glidden bikes to work every day. Many climbers mix cross country skiing and kayaking in with their time in the gym. Yoga is popular way to improve flexibility and balance.
"Any type of ab workout is going to benefit hugely in climbing," Gunderson said. Stronger abdominal muscles help take weight off of the hands in climbing.
"Ab work, cardiovascular, yoga, those are the three things I would put at the top of any workout," Gunderson said.
To build the youth team’s endurance, Gunderson has them strap on a backpack with weights in it, then scamper up the wall and back down nine times, then repeat that set another four to 12 times. It’s a heck of a workout.
Most adults at the gym, though, don’t focus that much on training.
"We get people that are very casually serious," Gunderson said. "If they have free time, they’re here. They live here. It tends to appeal to obsessive people, we get a lot of engineers, accountants."
Come next summer, the gym will be empty again. Even if the sun comes out for a week or two in the winter, climbers will be on the hunt for some dry rock.
Because no matter how much fun they have in the gym, rock climbers would rather be climbing rocks. Until then, of course, the gym is the next best thing.
"The only way to stay in shape to climb," Miller said, "is to climb."
Reporter Andrew Wineke:
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