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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He worked about six months to convert the hollowed-out factory to a rock climbing gym. He sunk about $30,000 into materials. For studs he bought unfinished two-by-sixes directly from a sawmill, Mammoth Lumber in Pelham, because the unplained boards were cheap. To face the framework he purchased 100 sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood from Home Depot. He screwed in big lags and torqued bolts and ran in countless sheetrock screws to keep his edifice firmly in place.

It held steadfastly for roughly a decade. Then, fittingly, Mark dismantled One Mill Street on his own. He was told to relocate, as part of an ambitious renovation program that would place a gabby restaurant in the big-beamed room that Mark had cleared to create Mill City climbing center. The gym moved to its current location on the hidden, back side of the same mill complex in summer 2006.
Mark completed the relocation for the most part on his own, again enlisting help from eager friends as first he wrecked the old structures, then transferred all the stout, weighty materials, and finally made new walls to challenge stalwart climbers.

At times during the relocation, Mark's original vigor and enthusiasm for the project resurfaced. But other times he attacked the task reluctantly. Sometimes he just let the work sit, demoralized by indecisions and doubletalk by his landlord, and uncertain about the ongoing prospects for his own business. Early in 2007, roughly six months after the move to 1934 Lakeview Avenue, Mark placed Mill City Rock Gym for sale.

Even before the move, Mark had complained about falling business. He gives reasons for that. Rock climbing isn't the fad it was a decade ago. Fewer people enter the field, while more climbing centers compete for the business that remains. Since Mill City's debut in '94 or '95 or whenever it was, a load of rock gyms have opened – in Dover, Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire, in Boston and Newburyport. Mill City Rock Gym just doesn't pay the way it once did.

But if Mill City is built on Mark Sousa's personality, its demise must also link to its owner. Changes in the rock gym business are real enough. But Mark also bemoans a fall-off in personal vitality as he steps close to age 60. He complains of soreness, stiffness, and a creeping uncertainty about what his body allows today. He has all but given up outdoor climbing and challenging hikes. His climbs inside at the gym these days are more measured and moderate.
Yet he is outside every day for private scrambles and explorations of local woods, swamps and scrublands. He follows game trails and scours for hidden remnants of vanished predecessors – cellar holes, bottle dumps, boundary markers and such. He explores abandoned settlements. He reads acutely about woodland lore, about early local history, about lost ways and forgotten landmarks up in the Whites. He discovers things, and in that light his looming departure from our sanctuary shows simply that Mark is rediscovering himself yet again.

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