Triangle Rock Club - Durham

My first climbing gym experience over a year ago and an amazing place to get started. Helpful staff, good culture and really good route setting for everyone. Pros: new top rope and lead wall area is incredible. Bouldering area is large and always has a great mix of styles. Friendly staff, fair pricing, and even packed it doesn’t feel too bad. Cons: lack of auto belay. Understandable for their safety concerns but still disappointing when you don’t always have a belay partner. gym area is small with little variety. Just a few benches and generally hard to get a workout in if more than 2-3 others are in there. Bummed to rarely utilize it. Also the classes can be hit or miss.

Great climbing gym with well-equipped fitness facilities. Super friendly staff too! They have a lot of climbing space and reset pretty frequently, so there's always tons to climb. It's also pretty representative of what you'd find outdoors which is really nice. I only have 2 issues, one minor and one major. - Minor: on a somewhat frequent basis, no staff member is there to open the gym on time. The gym will open 30+ minutes late. Not the biggest issue but it does happen often enough. - Major: very unsafe climbing practices and poor climbing etiquette when the gym gets really busy. This is really frustrating and concerning. People walking directly underneath climbers on the wall, crowding the wall, sitting in front of the wall, not being aware of interfering with someone who is already on the wall, kids running around making it difficult to climb safely. I'd really like to be able to enjoy bouldering when it's busy, but I've found that it's just not possible. Overall a wonderful place but definite room for improvement.

Climbing here is often a miserable experience. It's desperately crowded. It seems like there are a ton of routes, but many of them are five months old and no one wants to touch them anymore. What bothers me the most is that there is no protocol or guidance on how to share the gym. Some people believe that you are engaging in original sin if you start climbing a route when they're on the next route over, regardless of how far their climber is on the wall, TR or lead. Other people will create wildly risky situations, for example starting just after the climber next to them and then leading quickly, so that they would fall on the other climber who's on an interlocking route closely below. It's chaos, and people have all kinds of feelings about it--loudly. I have NEVER seen staff intervene. Scary things happen, and it doesn't feel safe. On busy nights (most weeknights), only 33-60% (depending on how risky people wanna be) of the routes are climbable because of these interlocking routes, so there aren't actually that many routes. WHY NOT MOVE THE ANCHORS FURTHER APART, HAVE FEWER ROUTE OVERALL, BUT MORE SAFELY CLIMBABLE ROUTES?! This might also help with the age of the routes, which is only going to get worse when they open up the new gym, which will inevitably slow down replacement in each gym. If you don't want to use this solution, could you PLEASE create a protocol for when folks can climb on next-door routes, one for TR and one for lead?! One day someone's going to die.

I’ve been with your gym since it opened. A few things have gone downhill but I’m happy to change review rating once they improve. 1. Please clean more. It’s pretty gross in there. Membership is too high for a dirty facility. I used to see it cleaned a few times a week. What happened? 2. Please hold camp counselors responsible for camp kids. I should not have kids climbing under me. I’m waiting for a hurt kid and a lawsuit. 3. The weight room is unusable during the hours of back to back fitness classes in the morning. At a regular gym you can switch out but the classes take over for hours straight. This isn’t new but I really wish there was a rack or two reserved for people who can’t do the classes. 4. Limited yoga offerings. Nothing M, W, F before 9am :( I was hoping this would pick up after you all bounced back from the construction. Kinda a wishlist item. I now pay for yoga elsewhere. The last two items are me expecting too much? It’s fair that climbing is top priority and the weight area and yoga are nice to haves. But the first two items are important and I hope they’ll be addressed.