Junction Climbing Centre — Attraction in Ontario

My wife and I have been climbing here about twice per week for over a year. For us, climbing is a fantastic way to challenge ourselves and stay in shape. It is intrinsically rewarding to finish a climb we have been working on for a while, and to have our stamina, technique, and grip strength improve noticibly over time.

Sometimes when we tell others that we rock climb as a hobby, they automatically say 'I don't think I could do that'. In our opinion, if you can climb a ladder (even if you would be very tired at the top), you can start climbing and have fun, and you will get stronger each time you come. Even some people with physical disabilities can climb, so that might not be a barrier either (ask the staff).

Junction does an excellent job at facilitating great climbing experiences. The staff are always friendly and helpful. One of the small benefits we've appreciated is that we can borrow belay glasses from the front desk so that we don't have to strain our necks when belaying other climbers. A membership at Junction is more expensive than a fitness gym, but the added cost is well worth it for the abovementioned benefits. The management also did an excellent job of communicating the gym rules around changing Covid restrictions and the reasoning behind their decisions.

Junction has sections of the gym devoted to bouldering, auto-belay, top rope, and lead climbing (top-rope climbing routes can also be lead-climbed using available anchors + carabiners). We don't lead climb ourselves, though many do. They also have a training room with holds and finger boards, and an upstairs section with workout equipment including treadmills, a rowing machine, free weights, and some other machines.

The bouldering problems and route climbs are fun. The route setters do a great job of setting climbs that require different combinations of strength, puzzle solving, balance, and dynamic motion. Most of the time, the labelled grade accurately reflects the relative difficulty of the climb, and when they don't it's not a problem because (a) climb difficulty doesn't change between the start and end of the climb so there are lower graded climbs that are surprisingly fun and (b) there are so many climbs that it's easy to move on to another climb when this happens.

Other climbers are friendly and helpful. I've experienced an especially strong sense of camaraderie while bouldering, even with strangers; others have been willing to offer advice and demonstrate climbing techniques when I asked, and recently I've offered help to others when asked.

Overall, we're very happy with our memberships, and we plan to keep climbing as...

Visits: 10+ Cost: Cheap

This is the only climbing gym around, and frankly, I feel like it can really let its quality slip a bit without getting worried about losing business. The gym is fairly cheap as far as gym's go, and the hours are very good - it's virtually never closed. The lead climbing is pretty good, and they make good use of their cave. Unfortunately, that's sort of where the good ends with the place.

The bouldering is really not good. They recently (2 years ago?) removed a long snaking boulder wall that had plenty of good and well-defined features and moved it upstairs into a U-shape where only the interior of the U is accessible. As a result, it's really difficult to get on the wall between other people, and you usually need to wait 5 minutes at a time between pulls on a particularly traverse-y climb. The setting is bad. Very reachy problems, holds are particularly chalky and worn, and often you'll struggle with a climb for a half hour only to later learn that the problem was that a hold had spun last week and nobody came to fix it.

Spinning holds is a huge issue here because I don't believe I've ever seen a finishing screw in any hold. Part-and-parcel to this is that I have easily seen more injuries at this gym than every other place I have ever climbed put together. I've seen people land on each other, a lot of sprained and broken ankles, a few dislocated shoulders, and once I even saw a hold come off the wall with someone holding on to it. The staff are remarkably apathetic about this sort of thing. When they were renovating the gym, they had a series of boulders along the leftmost wall. I remember hearing a setter chatting with his friend about how his boss asked him to lower the finishing holds on all the climbs by about six inches but he wasn't going to do it because 'he'll never notice anyway.'

Anyway, this is the only game in town; every community needs a gym and I hope that this one gets better. If you're in London, the gym will scratch an itch, and it is quite cheap. If you're passing through London, I would really suggest driving a bit further to...

This review applies only to top-rope and lead routes, as I don't boulder. This place could be really great if the setters were more experienced. Don't get me wrong, having a climbing gym no gym, no question. The holds are in great shape and the walls are walltopia (best in the biz, in my opinion), but the routes are generally poorly constructed. They use a collapsed version of the Yosemite decimal system (e.g., 5.10-, 5.10, 5.10+ instead of 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d, etc). This allows the setters a certain degree of leeway and imprecision. However, even beyond this, route difficulty is very inconsistent. Some 5.11s are easier than 5.10s, even when they are the same general type of route (e.g., both are primarily crimps with big, stemmy moves). The setters also create most top rope/lead routes to flow like bouldering routes (i.e., big moves/dynos) and avoid setting anything more technical or balance-focused. This, frankly, sucks pretty badly if you don't like bouldering style routes. Often, in order to make a route more difficult or challenging, the setters simply provide exceptionally few holds and spacing them so far apart that shorter folks don't have a chance in hell of reaching them. I was once climbing a roof and looked up to find the next hold 4 feet above my head while I was flipped over on my back. That's doesn't read as "challenging," to me, but rather inexperience. It's also important to know that they do not allow you to mock lead here (if you're new to using a grigri like I am, or are simply out of practice with lead climbing). They really want you to pay to take their lead belay class. In sum, there's nothing about the gym space itself that's problematic, but the setting is frustrating and some of the policies make things more difficult/expensive...