Mill City Rock Gym
A hand-built gym that captures climbing's true spirit.

Mill City founder and builder Mark Sousa

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In his 40th year Mark also took up rock climbing. The impulse struck him forcefully while he walked up a fourth-class pitch on White Horse Slab. He saw a team of climbers stationed on the wall where he was walking. They were tied into the ledge and working the ascent with rope, draws, slings, nuts, chocks, cams and all the essential paraphernalia of trad climbing. He recognized that his time to step up had arrived. He embraced climbing as an extreme extension of the hiking that brought him so much satisfaction and fulfillment. He pursued it with the same zealous intensity and eager determination. He applied the same athletic propensities, adroitly commanding his five-foot, seven-inch frame as by rapid degrees he learned to scale rock with a cunning precision.

He trained at Rumney Rocks when the place was just a roadside pull-off and the climbing guide only a booklet. The sport climbs at Rumney, with their bolted, prefixed placements, were a secondary pleasure to him anyway, an opportunity to tune up technique and simply to exercise. He preferred the greater challenge and adventure of trad climbing. He sought multi-pitch ascents for the sweeping views that opened so much rich grandeur to his gaze. Mark ascended most New Hampshire crags and cliffs during weekend excursions. He traveled when his laborer's life permitted. He motored the continent and flew to climbing destinations with companions Ted Korza, Andy Toth, Pete Puleo, Ralph Burke, Tim Kemple Sr. and others. He made trips to Joshua Tree, California, Smith Rock, Oregon, Red Rocks, Nevada, Devils Tower, Wyoming, the Needles and Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, Red River Gorge, Kentucky, Seneca and New River Gorge, West Virginia. He camped at the climbing sites and gave himself wholly to the rock. He was no idle tourist.

The idea to open a climbing gym came at another crossroad. Mark's personal life had already changed substantially. His first union ended, Mark had entered a common-law marriage with Kate in the middle-1980s. Their son, Joe, was born in 1985. Then, early in the 1990s, his occupational outlook shifted again. After Mark had worked about ten years with bricks, a herniated disk in his back threw him out of masonry. He was stuck again to find another livelihood.

Rock gyms at the time were still pretty rare. Cliff hanging was an outdoor activity, undertaken only in summertime. Crag masters spent winters just waiting for the thaw. But the indoor concept was emerging. Mark visited the two climbing gyms located anywhere near his Dracut home, Boston Rock Gym and a venue in Connecticut. Inside those big halls, Mark swiveled his head all around to peer critically at the fabricated walls and pre-cast holds. He said to himself, hey, I can do this.

He did it inside what was then a ramshackle, long-neglected, 200-or-so-year-old mill complex on Beaver Brook in Dracut. The mill itself was mostly abandoned, but some of the sprawling space was rented to tinkerers and industrial shop-men – millwrights, metal coaters, car refinishers and such. Bricks all over the dilapidated pastiche of antique factory buildings were loose and chalking. Plywood covering busted out windows was faded and curled and delaminating. The windows that remained were sooted. Grease and oil from spewing machines that had been removed years earlier still soaked the wood-board floors. The stout, long-running beams and arching braces that spanned ceilings spalled soiled accumulations of paint. Grime caked nooks and corners. Layers of dust and hard particulates coated every flat surface.

Enlisting help from friends and climbing companions, Mark cleared an expansive room to build a long wall reaching 20 feet to the ceiling and cut by big overhangs and indents and even a cave entrance that led to a bouldering room that seemed subterranean. He slanted long steel trusses from floor to ceiling to make a two-sided arete that faced the main wall. Using tall, stout boards he put in a peg climb and a pull climb. He built a service-counter near the door and a railed-off office area with peg racks for hanging rental gear, rock shoes and harnesses. He hung a chin bar and screwed finger boards into an overhanging incline he built alongside a lower, practice wall where new climbers could safely learn to belay. The project possessed him. Some weeks he went for seven days straight, arriving at One Mill Street at 7 a.m. and leaving around 10 p.m. He worked not from blueprints, drawings, sketches or any other pre-made plan. He created the climbing walls kinetically, framing up features on the fly, shaping ideas into wood-stud structures on the floor and then hefting them section-by-section onto the wall. He scrambled spider-like over the vertical framework, bolting, hammering, sawing, fitting, fastening. He faced section by section with stout, sturdy plywood that was back-studded by T-nuts to secure myriad climbing holds and support the hundreds of climbers who eventually would strain up the hand-built walls.

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