Upper Limits - St Louis, MO

This week my travels took me to the city with the King of Beers Budweiser in St Louis, MO. The city is a welcomed breath of fresh air compared to the craziness that is Chicago, IL. I almost forgot what it was like to get off the plane, pop on over to Dollar Rent-A-Car and haul ass down the interstate at 70mph during a time of high volume traffic. This city is a welcome for Colorado beer snobs since they house a tremendous amount of local breweries which are just what you need after a long day of work, or beast'n at the local climbing gym. What I like about this town is that if the shit goes down say a zombie invasion you can get on the interstate and get the F out of Dodge without sitting in traffic. If this was to happen in Chicago your best bet would be to board up your doors and windows and pray that you have enough food, water, and ammunition to last you through the hoards of the living dead.

Enough rambling, Upper Limits climbing gym. I was lucky enough to meet up with an old friend from my New River Gorge days who now lives in St Louis. For the first time I spent more time on the walls and less time on the boulders. The gym has textured climbing walls up to 35-ft tall on it's main level and 20-ft on it's upper level. There is a small bouldering area (no topouts) towards the back of the main area, campus board, locker room, bathrooms, and a nice pro shop with everything you'll ever need. The walls also had several autobelays, topropping of course, and lead climbing. The grades were all over the place using a mixture of the Yosemite Decimal System to the +/- system. I'm assuming this is a preference of the particular route setters. The ground is also layered with rubber shavings?

For the most part the routes were set very good and the holds were decent. The walls also ranged from slab, vertical, overhanging, cracks, aretes, and diehedrals. I liked the fact that the routesetters made good use of the walls with routes that did not just run up and down. A lot of these routes veered to the right and left throughout the length of the route starting on vertical (sometimes overhanging) walls and shifting left, or right onto an overhanging section. This practice is great for creating longer routes with shorter walls.

The gym is about 10,000 square feet in a town of about 2.8 million. Living here you are within reasonable distance to Jackson Falls, Red River Gorge, and Horseshoe Canyon. This basically means that you do have a descent climbing population and Upper Limits is your only option in St Louis. Honestly 10,000 square feet is just not enough when it gets crowded.

My biggest complaints about the gym are the following:
Some of the holds were in need of a good cleaning. I am also not a big fan of sharing bouldering problems with sport climbing routes. I just feel that the two should be separated. The rubber shavings that layered the floor are not my favorite. I personally feel that the rubber shavings do not disperse enough of the impacting energy from a fall even from heights as low as 3-ft (I had a spinal injury in Februay '09 and I can tell a big difference these days). However the gym did have at least 2 bouldering mats to shuffle around. The lack of training equipment such as a system board, a much larger campus board (they have a small one), and your usual training equipment was a disappointment. However it's a small gym with limited space and expandability in it's current location.

I did like this gym and would definitely like to come back when I'm in the area so please don't let me put anyone off by anything I've said because it's a very good gym. However my suggestions would be the following:

The upper section that has 20-ft walls is just not being utilized to it's potential. Over half of the walls were devoid of holds when I was there. Right now it's somewhat being used for their beginner training classes. Just get rid of that! Bring that to the main floor and host smaller classes. I can't imagine that this is even worth it. Take the current walls down and envision an awesome bouldering area with overhanging walls at varying degrees and layer it with problems. This would free up space from the bouldering/sport climbing wall sharing that is going on in the main area, and would separate the two as it should be. On the very back of the main area routes aren't even being climbed since the boulderers are just parked underneath them.

Well that's my two cents for the week. I've got a work trip planned to Baltimore soon so I'm excited about checking out Earth Treks again while I'm there.

Gym Overall: 7.0
Quality of bouldering: 4 (Great potential, but currently not up to par)
Quality of routes: 7 (35-t tall walls with top/lead routes and various terrain)
Attitudes of owners/workers: 7 (Pretty friendly staff)
Attitudes of climbers: 8 (It's hard to say since I met up with a friend and I didn't get a chance to chat with any other locals)
Cost: 8 ($15 day pass)