Comments (0) Best Rock Climbing Gym - 2011
Phoenix Rock Gym
1353 E. University Drive
Tempe, AZ 85281
480-921-8322
If you want to develop fingertips that work like steel hooks, there's no better place to do it than at the Phoenix Rock Gym in Tempe. We're ashamed to say that we've occasionally let months go by without a visit, but we've belonged to PRG since it opened in 1992 and we always find our way back. We love the people who work there, as well as the regulars and the newbies who try to claw their way to the top of the 30-foot walls. When our climbing partners can't go, we make the veins in our hands and forearms pop out on the two world-class bouldering walls, which don't require the use of ropes. Well before the place starts to look too familiar or grows boring, new paint goes up on the walls and holds get switched around in a most satisfying way. How these guys figure out how to make the perfect 5.10 for us, we don't know — but they do and, in the process, facilitate a climbing experience that makes us forget, for a moment, that we actually prefer to be outside. When we do hit real-world rock — a rarer occasion now that we've got kids — the practice we have at the rock gym makes for a much more confident, Spider-Man-like adventure. Oh, and those kids? Thanks to PRG, they went straight from diapers to diaper harnesses.
