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Local climbing gym scary place 5-Apr-2018 At 5:59:52 PM Sandym

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What's a person to do in this situation: the local gym I go to is primarily a regular gym with weights, classes, etc, but, they also have a climbing wall with about 8 to 10 ropes set up using ATC belay devices.

Hardly anyone uses the climbing wall, except for my partner and I and we don't bother with the ropes just boulder for training. But, whenever there is someone climbing there it is sketchy as hell.

Today, I saw a mid teens girl "belaying" a 5 year old who was near the top of the 6 metre high wall, except, she was holding the rope very loosely in one hand, while yakking away with another teenager ABOVE the belay device - essentially, the kid was not on belay at all! I corrected her right away and went over the gym owner who was standing right there and told him he needed to watch his belayers more carefully and he basically told me to piss off.

In another incident, the same group had some how got the climbers end of the rope to the top of the wall so they sent a kid up on a nearby rope swinging all over the place to bring the rope down. One of the workers at the gym seemed to think this was a grand idea.

As you may have gathered, no-one at the gym, including the owner is actually a climber and they seem completely clueless about the consequences of the shoddy or outright missing belay technique.

When I tried to talk to one of the gym workers about it later, she just said "we show them what to do but as soon as we walk away they do something different."

Obviously, the gym needs to up their standards with respect to not only instruction but supervision.

What I am unclear on is what, if anything I can do?

I raised the spectre of lawsuits, but, as I said the owner just wanted me out of his face.

It's one of those situations where if you were at an outdoor crag you would be like "Lets get out of here before we have to scrape blood off the base of the crag."