The Rock Boxx Climbing Gym — Local services in Salem

We booked a birthday party here today for my 10 year old and 9 other children. While the gym is fun, I don’t know that I’d schedule another party here again. The children’s climbing area was closed for construction or something, which was never explained to me while booking. They gave the kids access to the main bouldering area and explained the rules and then let the kids explore. While I understand this is a gym and things echo, the entire time we were there one of the two staff members would come over and ask the kids to use “inside voices”, none of these kids were even yelling, they were talking excitedly It felt like we were walking on egg shells the entire time. I understand safety concerns like not standing below someone that was climbing, but these kids were constantly being told not to be quiet. I could tell the other gym goes didn’t appreciate having kids in their bouldering area, I feel like the gym should shut down to other patrons during kids’ party times they offer if their customers are irritated with the birthday festivities. They offer two time spots for parties and without the kids area open children are apparently just irritating other gym goers. One of my kids said it felt like they weren’t wanted there by other people. I get it, kids can be excitable and get in the way of a gym atmosphere ,but I wouldn’t really recommend booking a party here for kids...

I’ve been climbing at this gym for about 6 months now and I really like it. It’s a great price (compared to other bouldering gyms), it’s pretty big, has a slackline, workout area, and they rotate routes quite frequently.

I am giving 5 stars because I do honestly recommend the place and it is a great community with very nice and friendly staff and patrons.

I do have a couple suggestions for improvement (writing this more for the owner): The upstairs area does not have any cleaning spray and the yoga mats up there get pretty dirty, would be great if there was cleaning supplies up there. It would be super nice if there was a mirror or two in the workout area. The kids birthday parties/kids in general are not well supervised by adults. Whenever there are kids in the gym they are constantly running under climbers. It would be nice to see the parents have more supervision over their children. Not sure if that is something the staff could re-enforce to the parents that the kids shouldn’t be running under climbers and that their kids should always be in view. This is just a safety concern in my opinion and it...

Very nice people, great atmosphere, lots of space. The problem is the holds. It seems like some of them have been used for decades and are extremely polished. Worse than the polish, though, is that the holds are terrible on your fingers. I’ve been climbing consistently for 3 years and have a pretty steady routine down. When I tried to do that routine in this gym I ended up with a minor ligament strain after a week. After taking some time off I found that this gym required an extra day or rest between sessions and/or much slower paced climbing sessions.

If you’re new to this gym, I’d strongly recommend taking it slow. If you own this gym, it needs modern holds.

edit: in response to the comment from the owner, I will say that they did get some new holds in the time that I was there, and that not all of their routes used the holds I'm complaining about. Nonetheless, this was the first time that I've gotten an overuse injury in three years of climbing, having been a regular (3 months +) at 4 different gyms. I've had the same routine (3 climbing sessions a week) at all...