Category: Walls

January 26, 2016

New heights for Reach Climbing Wall in London

My first proper indoor climbing experience was at the Reach, a climbing wall in South London. That was a year and a half ago and I’ve been climbing there quite regularly during this time progressing from top rope climbing, to lead and then traditional (trad) climbing outdoors.

Since I’ve taken up climbing I’ve tried out numerous indoor climbing and bouldering walls. In fact, I’ve pretty much tried out all of the walls in London looking for a place that I can frequent before or after work as well on weekends. I’ve always thought the Reach was a great all round wall in terms of what they had to offer, namely indoor bouldering, top rope and sport climbing as well as a training room and monkey/zoo room that caters for all age groups. Over the last few months some of the improvements they’ve made have, I believe, have established them as the top climbing wall in London. These are: -

New Overhanging Lead Climbing Wall

This has climbs graded from around 6a+ to 8a. As much as I like this new feature I haven’t had a chance to jump on it yet but will certainly be doing so over the next couple of weeks and as my grades improve.

Additional Bouldering Wall – aka The Taco

There’s already plenty of good bouldering on offer at the Reach, this new wall just adds a few more options. Here’s a short clip of me warming up with some traversing

New Auto Belays

The was one feature I really missed when joining the Reach and that is lacking at a lot of climbing walls (due to cost) is Auto Belays. When I first started climbing I didn’t know a lot of people who could belay me so I ended up bouldering and using the auto belay a lot. However, the Reach only had 1 or 2 Auto Belays so the number of routes I could do was limited. I’m pleased to say I now know more people that can belay me but that aside there are now 12 Auto Belay’s at the Reach graded from 4+ to 6c. This is superb if you would like to do some endurance training and the clip below show’s me doing just that

That’s my plug for this great indoor climbing wall, hope you get to try it out some day

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