The Birth of Indoor Rock Climbing

It's Thursday, September eighteenth. I went rock climbing last night. Indoors. In a gym with fifty-foot walls covered in brightly colored plastic blobs — blue slopers, red crimps, green jugs — while a playlist I didn't choose blasted through a warehouse in Oakland. And it occurred to me, hanging off a hold shaped like a cartoon dinosaur spine, that almost none of the people in that room had ever touched real rock. They didn't need to. Indoor climbing is now a sport unto itself — more people climb in gyms than outdoors, by a wide margin, and climbing became an Olympic event in 2020. But the entire thing — the holds, the routes, the gyms, the T-nuts behind every bolt-on blob — traces back to one brick corridor at the University of Leeds, in northern England, and an eighteen-year-old who had never climbed before.

In 1964, a phys-ed instructor named Don Robinson built a climbing wall in a corridor at the University of Leeds. This was not a climbing wall in any modern sense. It was rocks — actual rocks — cemented into brick. The wall was low, maybe eight or ten feet high. The idea was simple: climbers in northern England lose months every year to rain and cold, and a wall like this would let them stay in shape over winter without driving hours to a crag that might be soaked anyway. Nobody thought of it as anything more than maintenance. You don't get better on a wall, the thinking went. You just don't get worse.

Then John Syrett showed up.

Syrett arrived at Leeds in 1968, eighteen years old, never having climbed. Dark hair, dark eyes, curly, wiry. He stepped onto those slick cemented rocks and something clicked. He became obsessed. Not with climbing outdoors — not yet — but with that wall. He would traverse back and forth for hours, side to side, never coming down. The same moves, repeated until his fingers could find holds blind. Other students walked past the corridor to their lecture halls and saw him there, always there, a fixture.

Two years later, in November 1970, Syrett decided to try real rock. He went to Almscliff, a gritstone crag outside Leeds, and walked up to one of the most feared routes in Britain: the Wall of Horrors. Forty-five feet of near-vertical gritstone with almost no protection — a "chop route," in the language of the time, meaning if you fell, you hit the ground. The first ascent had taken Allan Austin multiple attempts in 1960, including one on a rope. Since then, the Wall of Horrors had turned away some of Britain's best climbers. Nobody had ever led it on sight — meaning walked up, looked at it, and climbed it from bottom to top without falling and without prior knowledge of the moves.

Syrett onsighted it. He hung on a jam for nearly fifteen minutes to place a single piece of protection, then made the crux moves without drama. The whole thing took twenty minutes. A witness said he climbed it "with ease, making it look like any other climb." Syrett was twenty. He had been climbing for less than two years. Almost all of his training had happened on that wall.

Syrett proved something that sounds obvious now but was genuinely contested at the time: training on an artificial wall translates to real rock. The Leeds wall became legendary. Climbers started building their own. In the 1970s, the University of Washington put up a forty-foot outdoor wall. Climbers screwed wooden strips to garage walls and crimped on those. In Los Angeles, a scene grew under highway overpasses, where climbers glued holds onto concrete. But all of these had the same problem: the holds were permanent. You glued a rock to the wall, and that's where it lived forever. If you wanted to change the route, you needed a chisel.

In 1983, a French climber named François Savigny had a different idea. Instead of gluing rocks to walls, he would make holds out of plastic resin — moldable, textured, consistent — and put a bolt hole through the middle. Now you could attach a hold with a single bolt. You could remove it. You could move it. You could create an entirely new route by rearranging the same holds. Savigny made his first mass-produced holds in 1985 and founded a company called Entre-Prises. A year later he developed the first modular climbing panels — entire wall sections you could assemble like puzzle pieces. The indoor climbing industry was born from those two ideas, a bolt hole and a mold.

But there was one more piece nobody talks about. A piece of hardware called a T-nut. It looks like a tiny flanged barrel with threads inside. You hammer it into a pre-drilled hole in the plywood wall from the front, and the flange bites into the wood, holding it in place. Now a bolt can thread into it from the front — no need to get behind the wall. Without the T-nut, setting a route meant crawling behind the plywood to tighten a nut every time you wanted to add or move a hold. With the T-nut, one person with a wrench could reconfigure an entire wall in an afternoon. Climbing gyms went from static to dynamic. The wall became a canvas, and routesetting became an art.

The T-nut is an unremarkable piece of hardware. You've probably never noticed one, even if you climb three times a week. But the person who decided to embed a T-nut in plywood and bolt a plastic hold to it from the front — whoever that was — is one of the most important unnamed figures in the history of sport.

In 1987, two climbers in Seattle — Rich Johnston and Dan Cauthorn — opened the Vertical Club on Elliott Avenue. It was the first commercial climbing gym in the United States. They built the whole thing for fourteen thousand dollars. Today that wouldn't pay for a single day of construction on a modern climbing gym.

The walls were three-quarter-inch plywood, painted with epoxy, and the holds were rocks. Actual rocks. Friends brought them back from climbing trips — Joshua Tree, the Buttermilks, City of Rocks — and Johnston and Cauthorn glued them to the plywood. When they ran out of rocks, they asked people to bring more. There were no manufactured holds in the US yet. The first plastic holds wouldn't arrive until late 1988.

They charged a hundred and twenty dollars for a yearly membership. People thought it was absurd — paying money to climb indoors, on fake walls, in a warehouse. The local climbing community told them it would fail. "Bringing climbing indoors," Johnston later wrote, "what a lame idea."

The gym survived because it became a community. Climbers who had been scattered across the Pacific Northwest now had a place to gather when it rained — which, in Seattle, was most of the time. Within a year, Gary Rall opened Portland Rock Gym, the second in the country. Rall had gotten the idea on a climbing trip to Sheffield, England, where he saw a wall at a community center and thought: Portland is just as rainy. This could work.

By the early 1990s, gyms were opening across the country. Philadelphia, Boston, DC. The Vertical Club eventually became Vertical World and now has three locations. Portland Rock Gym is still running, thirty-seven years later. The industry Johnston and Cauthorn launched for fourteen thousand dollars — as a side project they didn't think would take off — is now worth billions.

In 2020, sport climbing made its Olympic debut in Tokyo. The walls were built by Entre-Prises, Savigny's company, now called EP Climbing. Three and a half decades after a Frenchman carved a bolt hole into a chunk of resin, the same holds were being touched by the best climbers on earth, on live television, in an event watched by millions of people who had never seen climbing before.

John Syrett's story doesn't have a happy ending. After his meteoric rise, he severed two tendons in his fingers at a party — opening a beer can with a knife. He never recovered as a climber. He became a heavy drinker, was deeply shaken by the death of a coworker on a North Sea oil rig, and died young. The British climbing historian Mick Ward traces the entire modern indoor climbing industry back to "one wall, one climber, and one route." The wall was Don Robinson's corridor at Leeds. The route was the Wall of Horrors. The climber was a kid who spent two years shuffling sideways on cemented rocks until he could climb anything.

Last night, I stood under a wall covered in plastic holds — hundreds of them, in colors that don't exist in nature — and tried to read a route set by someone I'll never meet. The holds were bolted into T-nuts someone hammered into plywood months ago. The whole thing probably cost more than fourteen thousand dollars to build. And every piece of it, from the bolt to the blob to the idea that you can get better at climbing without ever going outside, started with a brick corridor in Leeds that nobody thought mattered.