This was easily one of my favourite moments from Montana. We anticipated to climb outdoors but ended up getting dumped on by rain which seemed to be a common occurrence on this trip.

We decided to do some indoor bouldering to pass the time and took the trek to drive 1.5 hours to the nearest climbing gym. When we arrived in the town, we were cruising at about 120km/h and blasting through traffic lights that were out. We thought perhaps it was normal or maybe the power was out.

When we got to the gym, it turned out it was actually in an old strip mall. When we got inside all the lights were out and the place looked abandoned. There was a lady in the mall and we asked her about the power outage and she assured us that it was common in the smaller towns of Montana. There was no sign of it coming back on anytime soon, but we decided to scope out the gym anyways since we drove such a far distance.

It looked empty inside and was pitch black since the gym was tucked in the back of the mall. We peered through the glass doors and I decided to try and see if they were unlocked. To our surprise they were, and we decided to enter. There was nobody at the front desk or anything, but we found a guy sitting on his phone. He happened to also be a photographer and was down to send some climbs in the dark if we brought in our lights. We went back to the car and grabbed our headlamps and solar lamps from @mpowered and sent some climbs. About 30 minutes later a man came out from the back and said if we needed him to give him a holler. We climbed for about 2 hours and it was such an unreal time trying to work out hard moves and boulders in complete darkness. We even sent plenty of dyno’s which was interesting to say the least. We had such an unreal time, made great friends, and it was one of the most unique climbing experiences I’ve had.