Indoor Climbing Around The San Fransico Bay Area

Wow! The gyms are sooooo fre@#@4kin big. And every one of them basically has a enough fitness equipment to qualify is as a normal fitness gym is you don't even look at the climbing! Check out the size of these places:

4 Days in Oregon, USA

Reference: Climbing in Oregon, USA

It's sometimes sad that the world is so big and we are so small. There are 400+ climbing gyms in The USA which we wish we could visit on this trip, not to mention all the world class outdoor climbing we would love to hit up... Thus, we only got to spend 2 days in Portland and 2 days at Smith Rock. Our impressions of Oregon folk are REALLY high. We had the same impact for the site over 2 days there as 9 days in Washington! Here are glimpes of some of the amazing indoor and outdoor climbing for Oregon, USA:. Add Climbfind as a friend on facebook to gain access to the full Oregon photo album.

Episode 2 of our Video Blog - Car Hunting

Sorry for the out of orderness of this post. In line with the fact that we had HUGE dramas looking for a van in Vancouver a month ago, when we finally got the movie together the sound didn't work. But just like we ended up with the perfect dirtbag mobile, we also found a replacement sound track that youtube accepted.

10 car inspections later we found our new love 'Sheila' (look that up in urban dictionary if you don't know what the word means):

1 x King Size Bed
1 x Queen Size Bed
1 x Fridge, Stove & Oven
1 x $1000CAD refitted pinoeer sound system & mp3 deck.

All of this for a grand total of $3000CAD. We are stocked and have been enjoying the van thoroughly over the last few weeks in Washington, Oregon & now California.

Indoor Climbing Around Seattle

The end game for Climbfind is that you can type in any city / area in the world into the search box up the right of the site (try London, Sydney, California, Canada for examples) and

1) Be told all the outdoor & indoor climbing in the area.
2) Have access to the communities who climb there so you can find people to climb with.
3) Get a feel for what the climbing is like via movies specifically relevant to each place.

Seattle turned out to be quite a buzz for indoor climbing. We visited 4 of the 7 gyms in the general area. The most notable characteristic of Seattle gyms is that each has a fitness gym! That seemed strange to me since Seattle is one of the Coffee Mecca's of the world and not one gym served coffee which is a large source of revenue for most gyms back in the UK.

Anyway, I'll let you suss out what you think by looking at the different walkthrough tours I took. Should you want to see any of the other 80 I have taken around the world you can find them here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jonathonclimbfind

Below shows in order:

Vertical World Bremerton
Vertical World Seattle
Vertical World Redmond
Stone Gardens

Exploring Squamish - The Cheif Bouldering Field, The Room & Dream Catcher

5 minutes drive South of Squamish Town lies The Chief Car park, which is just under The Grand Wall of 'The Chief', a 2000+ foot high granite dome full of marvellous cracks, arêtes and multipitch trad routes.

Little does one know, right underneath this monolithic face is an enchanted Seder forest full of lush giant boulders and in this field you can find 'The Room' where Chris Sharma sent 'Dream Catcher' the infamous 5.14d technical slab followed by thin campusing ledge climbing route. The Bigup productions film of this send (below) is one of my favourite ever climbing clips. Our version is a little more humble but gives you a more realistic (and far less artistic) version of this glorious cave.





JSK

The first of many indoor climbing gym tours

One of the things that made Climbfind famous quickly in the UK when we started 6 months ago is that we filmed short 2 minute tours of every indoor climbing centre we visited. You can find them all on my channel page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jonathonclimbfind

This is the first of many many tours for the 2009 roadtrip and it was taken at the Cliffhanger Vancouver Climbing Gym:

What Climbfind does

As much as we would love to spend our whole road trip climbing in the sun, ultimately we will spend most of it promoting the site. One of our main duties is to demo it to people on our laptops. Here is the pitch we use to introduce it. If you like CF post this link onto your facebook profile or twitter to share it with your friends now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLZcyPTaNY

We will be filming a few more of these as guides to how to best use the site. Hope you find it useful.

JK