Vertical Dreams — Attraction in Nashua

Nice climbing gym. Many different walls to climb with varying difficulty levels and inclines, as well as many kinds of hold shapes. Bouldering area is nice but not the biggest I've seen. Staff is always helpful and friendly.

Update: After going to Mass gyms, I lowered by rating from 5 to 3. I don't like the colored tape method, actually, I hate it. All Mass gyms I've been to (about 4 now), have colored holds for each route.

I honestly don't know why VD doesn't just take down several routes and a time, and collect the holds by color, and rebuild the routes with only one color.

Also, I took another star off because the place is honestly pretty run down. Several boulder routes were incomplete. We came across loose holds (which can be dangerous). They just stopped having holds at the end of the route, missing or hard to see tape, etc. There's really no excuse for that.

I wish new a new owner emerged and revitalized this gym and brought it into 2024 climbing standards. Tape colored holds is very much the OLD way of doing things. I would gladly pay $5 more per visit on the day pass, and it would still be cheaper...

Great old-school climbing gym at a great price, severely hampered by short staffing. Please have more than one person on staff during a weekday evening rush.

I went here for the first time with a couple friends who had been there before. We bought our day passes and tried to take a lead test, and ended up waiting for ~1 hour 15 minutes because the only staff member there physically couldn't split his attention that many ways and had to keep jumping around to sign people in, give intro safety lessons to others, etc. We ended up giving up on the lead test which was unfortunate since I came up from Boston because the shape of the walls looked like it'd be fun on lead.

Don't lose the forest for the trees. We got some great exposition on the importance and variations of clipping techniques, but then didn't have time to do much of anything else let alone actually take a lead test. Consider hiring more people, drawing in volunteers with free membership to have more hands on deck, or limiting capacity based on staffing. Otherwise the shortfall causes both service and potential...

I feel bad about doing a negative review, especially when the front desk was nice. The bouldering section was just too small, and the floor isn't padded so you have to move around crash pads. When a lot of people try to boulder, it's easy to run out of crash pads even if there was room to climb, and I personally just don't feel as safe with crash pads compared to gyms with padded floors. Knowing that some of the floor wasn't padded did not help considering that the climbs didn't flow well in my opinion. Additionally, they had a much smaller assortment of campus boards/workout equipment, and didn't even have the bench cubbies to store your stuff. It also felt less clean than other gyms, though that may be down to the lighting and the old walls they use.

It is much much cheaper though ($15 compared to $27 elsewhere when you don't need gear) and again, the staff...