Meet the Guy Who Invented the Belay Test—and the Modern American Climbing Gym

Forty years ago, there was not a single purpose-built climbing gym in the U.S. In 1987, Seattle’s Vertical Club opened and a year later, the Portland Rock Gym launched. But the concept of a profitable indoor climbing gym was far from proven. This is the story of the person whose vision and determination would revolutionize climbing gyms as we know them today.

Peter Mayfield was a climbing prodigy. At 16 years old, in 1978, he was repeating the hardest free climbs in Yosemite. He went on to establish some of the hardest aid routes on the Valley’s big walls. By the age of 19, he was guiding for the prestigious Yosemite Mountaineering School, and became chief guide a year later. When sport climbing competitions began in the late 1980s, Mayfield participated in the first ever Snowbird climbing competition as well as Jeff Lowe’s national competitions.

In 1988, Mayfield formed a guiding cooperative with legends Kim Schmitz and Jim Bridwell, but by his mid-twenties, he was looking for a job that would keep him closer to home. So when Bridwell returned from a trip to Europe with posters and magazines of climbing walls going up in France, Mayfield knew he’d found his next venture.

At the time, the walls in France were closer to artwork in public spaces than purpose-built climbing structures. It was around that time that the Vertical Club—a space for experienced climbers to train—went up, but Mayfield had something completely different in mind. As chief guide of the Yosemite Mountaineering School, he didn’t just want to create a place for himself and his buddies to get stronger. “I had this serious career of turning people onto this sport,” reflects Mayfield. “I was really thinking [about] kids, corporate programs … The word gym wasn’t even in my mind. It was more like an indoor climbing institute.”

With the popularity of indoor climbing gyms these days, it’s hard to imagine what it was like in the late ’80s, when climbing itself was still very much a niche activity. Mayfield knew that to keep the gym lights on, he’d need to attract more than just his hardcore climbing buddies.

Then there was the problem with California’s legendary great weather. Mayfield was skeptical that climbers would want to climb indoors on days when the sun was shining, because unlike Seattle and Portland, you could climb outdoors virtually year-round. So his marketing plan was also designed to get non-climbers to come to his gym. He wanted to build a place where “10,000 eight-year-old girls could try something they never dreamed of.”

“That was my pitch,” Mayfield says.

The economics of the first commercial climbing gym

Mayfield found his first investor while guiding an ascent of Alaska’s Moose’s Tooth. Tent-bound by storms for days, he discussed his climbing gym dreams with his clients. At the end of the expedition, as they were splitting up at the Oakland Airport, one of the clients asked him what he needed to start his business. He replied that he needed money for a phone line. The client pulled out his wallet and gave him $200. “I literally got handed two C-notes to start my business,” he remembers. He used that money to put in a Pacific Bell phone line in his mother’s basement in Berkeley and got to work.

“I got no positive reaction from the [climbing] industry at all,” remembers Mayfield. “I was pretty connected because I climbed with Bridwell. I met with the CEO of The North Face. I met with the CEO of Marmot. I met with the president of REI. They all said ‘it will never work. It makes sense in Seattle where it rains. Who would ever climb indoors in California?”

Mayfield even sent his business plan to Yvon Chouinard. “He was very polite and gave me some good advice,” Mayfield recalls. “He did not invest. None of them invested. But he kind of got what I was talking about.” (Chouinard did tell Mayfield that he should try to sell milkshakes: “If you can nail it with the youth, you will kick ass.”)

So Mayfield widened his net, contacting ”everybody in Silicon Valley who had ever climbed” and raised half a million dollars with 48 limited partners, essentially a large group of $5,000 investors. He stalled for a while, dealing with the mountain of paperwork associated with creating such a high volume of limited partnerships. But in the midst of his fundraising, he produced the Great Outdoor Adventure Fair in San Francisco. To promote his concept to the general public, he set up a portable climbing wall at the fair. John Gage, high up in management at one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups, Sun Microsystems, was impressed and tossed in $40,000, re-energizing Mayfield.

But at that time, building a climbing gym was a huge, complex undertaking. Mayfield relied on a suite of competent advisers to help him through. He eventually hooked up with Armand Tanny of Gold’s Gym, who explained the new, revolutionary process of selling and managing memberships via an automatic fund transfer. They also impressed upon him the importance of aesthetics. The other two climbing gyms had spent no more than $18,000 building their gyms. Mayfield spent $40,000 on just the bathrooms.

Building a gym for climbers—and non-climbers

“So then I was like, ‘Okay, this is a gym. This is not an indoor sculpture garden that we climb on that’s a climbing institute. I am going to build a business model with monthly memberships,'” adds Mayfield. He decided to call it City Rock Gym. The gym was located in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley.

“I made the first gym you could take your kid to and trust that they would be well taken care of,” he explains.

A number of climbing wall companies, such as Entre-Prises, were pressing Mayfield to help him build his gym. Instead, he turned to Christian Griffith, who he had climbed with on the competition circuit, and who felt that they could design an ”incredible space” together.  “Christian posted up in south Berkeley in my mom’s yard and carved foam for two weeks and he completely created that gym,” recalls Mayfield. “He took foam core and glued graph paper to it and he did a beautiful model. He was inspired by the gritstone cliffs in England where you are always like ‘what’s around the corner?’ So City Rock had these really protuberant buttresses.”

Overall, the City Rock Gym design was both intentional and approachable. “When people walked in the door I wanted them to see the friendly slab. I wanted them to think they can do this,” he explains. “I want them to see the six year olds climbing. I really felt that I had to prove the concept. It’s not me and my bros throwing down at the boulders.”

Instruction served as another key pioneering element of Mayfield’s gym concept. He began teaching the climbing safety techniques he’d learned from the Sierra Club, an organization which had been studying and teaching belay practices since the 1930s. “We really did invent the belay test,” he recalls, citing the need for procedure in such a high-risk business. “I thought somebody would die at our business. I ran the statistics in my head. So many people tying knots. So many people belaying. I really took it seriously.”

Given the magnitude of risk, Mayfield says he really “leaned into” establishing a belay test and enforcing safety. “I had some really good, famous, climbers come in and fail the belay test,” he recalls. “These good climbers were just a little too casual with their hands. You don’t vaguely slide your hands around. They had to tighten their act up a little bit.”

On City Rock Gym’s grand opening weekend in 1990, 900 people came in to climb. Mayfield watched brand-new climbing ropes wear out in front of his eyes. “We installed these half-pipe sealed bearing things so the ropes wouldn’t wear out, but on Sunday morning: ‘Oh my God! I see cores in that rope. Quick, replace that,’” remembers Mayfield. “I took the climbing school really seriously. I hired the best and they were well trained … It was really high level with really good technique coaching.”

City Rock quickly gained a loyal following. With his emphasis on introducing new participants to the sport, Mayfield pioneered programs like a kid’s belay clinic and the first climbing-themed birthday parties. He created an event called Women on Rock and flew in Lynn Hill to teach it. The vertical dance team Bandaloop got its start at City Rock in 1991.

But could a commercial climbing gym keep elite climbers stoked?

While he was intent on attracting non-climbers to the gym, Mayfield didn’t turn his back on his climbing buddies. He created routes for their level of difficulty and also gave some of them jobs. Many experienced climbers including Scott Cosgrove, Steve Schneider, Bird Lew, and Don Welch worked at City Rock.

“We set some hard routes,” remembers Schneider, a 5.14 climber and one of the routesetters at City Rock. “We did some competitions there which were very successful and those routes would be left up for others to climb.”

As the initial buzz of City Rock’s grand opening wore off, two vital questions remained: Were established climbers willing to climb indoors on sunny days? And were the routes difficult enough to keep experienced climbers satisfied? “I was initially a little skeptical but found I really enjoyed it,” recalls Greg Murphy who, together with Chan Harrell, held the fastest known time on the Northwest Face of Half Dome. “There was nothing super steep as I recall, so the harder routes were kind of finger intensive. But it always seemed like there was a good mix of routes and some harder projects to work on.”

Anne Smith, an excellent climber and the mother of Connor Herson, agrees: “CR [City Rock] was very much geared towards experienced climbers. [It] hosted National Championship events and set at least as many harder climbers as easier ones.”

As a competitive sport climber himself, Mayfield eagerly hosted national championship competitions five years in a row. Hans Florine had set the speed record on the Nose with Steve Schnieder the week before he won the 1990 nationals in both difficulty and speed at City Rock. For the next three years, Florine partnered with Mayfield and City Rock to stage the national championships there. The gym played host to top climbers such as Robyn Erbesfield, Bobbi Bensman, Dale Goddard, and Jim Karn.

The inclusive climbing gym concept takes off

Three years after City Rock’s opening, California got its second climbing gym via Tom Davis’s now-famous Pacific Edge, in Santa Cruz. (Chris Sharma and Natalia Grossman both learned to climb there.) Davis was inspired by what Mayfield had created: “It was visionary to open a gym in California at the time—but that is really hard to imagine now. From a dream to a nationwide industry.”

But Davis recalls that perhaps the most important thing City Rock did for the climbing gym industry was establish safety standards to manage risk, including legitimate belay tests. “It could easily have been a dirtbag climbers’ training hangout,” Davis explains. “But they pulled off something that demonstrated the true value of climbing: risk taking with the correct skillset, and on a level that a discerning public could understand.”

In 1992, Mayfield and Casey Newman, who ran the Colorado Rock Gym, along with several others, founded the Climbing Gym Association, which has since become the Climbing Wall Association. The purpose of this organization was to regulate the burgeoning climbing gym industry, hopefully keeping the government from stepping in with its own set of regulations. They built a gym accreditation program and traveled around the country accrediting the dozens of climbing gyms that existed by that time in the U.S. But that’s a story for another time.

What ever happened to the original City Rock—and Mayfield?

So how did the original design of City Rock hold up? Jim Collins, a notable climber, bestselling author, and business guru who taught MBA students at Stanford University, studied City Rock as a class project. The academic analysis found that City Rock was “going to get blown out of the water by the next wave of climbing gyms,” in Mayfield’s words. Collins and his students had two major reasons to back up their conclusion. The first was that City Rock’s walls weren’t steep enough. And the second reason was that they hypothesized other entrepreneurs would come along and operate gyms more efficiently at a lower cost.

Mayfield explains the limited steepness of his gym’s original walls: “[City Rock] was designed and built before America had super steep climbing. It was before there was a Rifle. It was before there was a Jailhouse Rock. Two or three years later, the next wave of gyms did have arches and bigger, steeper, upside-down climbing structures because the cliffs that people were climbing on were like that. The hard climbing in 1989 was like Smith Rock. Dead vertical or maybe a bit past vertical, like 100 degrees.”

In 1997, Mayfield sold City Rock to Mark Melvin, who founded Mission Cliffs, now Touchstone Climbing. He then moved back to Yosemite, where he started an eco-tourism business to educate people about nature and conservation in the Valley.

While the decision to sell the gym he poured his heart and soul into for the better part of 10 years was difficult, he made some money and his investors did well trading up into the Touchstone world. “I couldn’t care less about making money. I am just not wired that way to manipulate the world to make money.” He says that in retrospect, he was “faking it” as a business person and finds himself better adapted to social entrepreneurship.

After the sale, City Rock fell victim to the skyrocketing rents associated with the Internet boom in the Bay Area. When rent tripled in the highly desirable Emeryville area, it was time to look for another location. The new owners of City Rock honored its memberships and opened Berkeley Ironworks a few miles away in 2000. It was three times the size of City Rock and also featured a large fitness area, a yoga studio, and an indoor cycling room. It represented the next generation of climbing gyms.

Nowadays, Mayfield lives in Truckee, CA, where he founded the nonprofit Gateway Mountain Center, which focuses on nature-based therapy for kids. “Even to this day, I stay interested in the effect [of climbing gyms] on youth, especially high-need youth,” says Mayfield. He also works with kids from local drug treatment centers and juvenile detention camps. “I am watching these kids just light up,” he says. “They are incarcerated, but they get to climb. This is transformative for high-need youth.”

Thirty-five years have passed since Mayfield first started City Rock. While his impacts on the climbing gym industry are clear, he also continues to abide by his personal commitment to benefit youth through climbing. Mayfield still climbs, but these days, prefers Berkeley’s iconic Indian Rock to a climbing gym.

Reflecting on his pioneering foray into climbing gyms, he says: “I had kind of a classic business school case study of being the pioneer who spends all the money on R&D to prove the concept, then gets blown out of the water by the next wave, the well-funded MBAs who come after.”

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