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Find Climbers In Your Area

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Plastic in Silicon Valley

sji

13-Dec-2010
2:46:10 PM

Hi All

There's a chance i'll be heading to to the States to work for 6 months next year. If it all comes together i'll be working in San Jose, but I gather there are a few cities within pretty close proximity.

Finding a gym seems to be my best chance of a) staying at least a little bit fit and b) finding locals to show me the real rock - can anyone recommend one?

Thanks (in advance...)

pmonks

13-Dec-2010
4:02:33 PM

Shoot me an email - I live in SF and am always looking for visitors to sandbag!

Ben_E

13-Dec-2010
11:29:55 PM

Planet Granite has 3 great gyms in the Bay Area, the closest one to San Jose being in Sunnyvale (http://www.planetgranite.com/ ). These would be a good option (there may also be other gyms I don't know about in San Jose).

May also be worth putting up a thread on climbfind or supertopo to try to find climbers in the area; there's no shortage of them.

pmonks

14-Dec-2010
7:25:34 AM

There are two major "chains" of gyms in Northern Cali: Touchstone and Planet Granite - both are great (the average quality of gyms here is significantly higher than in Aus, imho). There are also a couple of independent gyms, but they tend to be smaller and/or more "crossover" types of places (e.g. a small wall in a sports gym).

A good map should help to figure out where the various gyms are actually located. San Jose proper is as boring as batshit, so you'll probably end up wanting to live somewhere a bit more interesting. San Francisco is the sh1t (2 awesome gyms - one TS and one PG), but it's a helluva long commute (San Francisco to San Jose is about 80kms and during peak hour that can easily take 2 hours each way to drive).

There is also a bit of outdoor stuff in the Bay Area, although it's nothing compared to Sydney (which is completely spoiled for volume and convenience of real rock). In a nutshell it's not worth basing a decision on where to live based on where the real rock is - there's not enough of it and it's not good enough to be a factor - you'll probably end up doing weekend trips to the Sierras during the climbing season and that's equally painful no matter where you live.

sji

14-Dec-2010
8:58:09 AM

Thanks guys. Very much appreciated.

PM'd you Pete - would be great to have someone show me around.

There are 5 messages in this topic.