Forget studying for your next physics test, try fighting gravity while rock climbing! Climbing is a great activity to fill the upcoming summer months and take a break from classroom chairs. Seattle Bouldering Project has multiple bouldering gym locations around Seattle, so rock climbing is always only a stone’s throw away. Hearing about it from friends, I decided I had to give climbing a go.
Bouldering is a type of rock climbing with no harness or rope needed. You can walk straight in and start climbing almost immediately with no training. Rock climbing is still enjoyable even with little experience.
A day pass at SBP costs $18, but you can purchase a monthly subscription for $62 per month. If you already know a member, you can get in for free on your first visit. Ideally, you’ll want a pair of special climbing shoes and a chalk bag to keep your hands dry while climbing, which will run you about $5 each visit if you’re renting equipment from SBP. I highly recommend investing in your own gear if you plan on taking up bouldering as a hobby.
SBP creates climbing “problems” or routes of different difficulty tiers. They’re marked by different colors, with yellow and red being the easiest and white being the hardest. I’ve enjoyed making three visits over the last few weeks. Each time, I was able to complete harder and harder routes. By the end of my third visit, I was completing red, green and purple problems with ease, and had even completed a few orange routes.

I found the whole experience very fun, enjoyable and rewarding. The different tiers of difficulty ensure that you can adequately challenge yourself, but always complete a route or two without much trouble. SBP regularly resets parts of their climbing walls, constantly providing new and interesting problems to tackle. I leave feeling tired, but excited to return and ready to prove myself on even harder routes.

There are also areas of the gym that require different skills than others. “The Cave” is an almost horizontal surface that forces you to hang upside down to complete routes. I quickly found out that some routes require more technical skill, while others require more upper body strength and agility. While I wasn’t able to complete a route on the “The Cave” immediately, I plan to keep trying until I do. If you’re at all worried about getting injured, don’t be; SBP has lots of padding and safety handles to help you get down from the top of the wall or protect you if you fall.
But really, anyone at at almost any level of fitness can pick up climbing as a hobby. SBP also has a weight room that you can independently train in. I highly recommend anyone with a free afternoon try a session at SBP. Bouldering is easy to get into and it’s a great way to kill time while simultaneously improving your general fitness.