Until you have kids, you probably won’t care what “family friendly” means—because you don’t need to. But once you’re a parent, those two little words can come to mean a lot, because as you’ll quickly learn, bored children can wreak more havoc than wolverines cut loose in a mattress store.
Living in or visiting family-friendly climber towns means that you get more climbing time, whether it’s because there are chill climbing venues with friendly staging areas, a short approach, and a good variety of climbs for everyone in the family, or because there’s also tons of fun stuff to do off the rock, which might wear your kids out and buy you that precious crag time.
Here are 10 classic family-friendly climber towns in North America, with a bit about what makes them so good for parents and kiddos alike.
The mountain town of Canmore is encircled by the Canadian Rockies at their most resplendent, a land of massive, vertiginous, castellated mountains, turquoise glacial lakes, and so much climbing, be it on the rock of the Bow Valley (Yamnuska, Grotto Canyon, Echo Canyon, etc.) or, in winter, the Rockies’ massive, frozen waterfalls. For families, summer offers a plethora of hikes to scenic venues like Grassi Lakes and Upper Kananaskis Lake, fun guided activities like helicopter tours, rafting, and sled-dog rides, and electric-bike rentals. In winter, families can get their cross-country ski on at the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park’s network of trails.
This gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) is surrounded by granite and gneiss, with world-class bouldering and alpine routes within RMNP, fun multipitch trad cragging at Lumpy Ridge, and good, small sport areas like Jurassic Park and Wizard’s Gate nearby. But the town also has loads of fun tourist attractions, from the Estes Park Aerial Tram to the Giant Rainbow Slide at Fun City: visible as you drive toward RMNP and actually pretty dang fun, it costs $2 per ride to slide down on a burlap sack. There’s also the trail-ringed Lake Estes, where you can rent kayaks, paddleboards, and pontoon boats. But perhaps the most family-friendly attraction for climbers is Performance Park, with 20 moderate sport climbs (plus one gear line and a few boulders) in a city park, with picnic benches and everything.
Fayetteville is considered the outdoor mecca of the Southeast for good reason: It sits on the rim of the New River Gorge, with its hulking boulders and thousands of near-perfect single-pitch climbs on dense Nuttall sandstone. And the local rivers—the New, the Gauley, and the Cheat—have world-class rafting that ranges from family-friendly float trips on class I and II water to massive class V rapids. The gorge, meanwhile, recently became a national park, and it has plentiful camping, 100 miles of hiking trails, and kid-friendly activities like fishing and mountain biking. The town itself is charming, complete with a classic red-brick courthouse and family-friendly dining options like Pies & Pints, which has arcade games and a playground.
The hamlet of Jasper, deep in the Ozarks, is close to two of Arkansas’s most iconic climbing areas—Horseshoe Canyon Ranch and Sam’s Throne—with tons of other cragging and bouldering on the abundant local sandstone, and even some newly developing limestone cliffs along the Buffalo River as access gets sorted. Other Ozarks attractions like Lake of the Ozarks and the tourist/entertainment town of Branson, Missouri, have long been major draws for families, but Jasper offers a quieter getaway with other engaging outdoor activities beyond climbing, including rafting, kayaking, and canoeing on the Upper Buffalo River; ziplining and mountain biking at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch; and, for foodies, the 100-year-old Americana-themed burger joint the Ozark Cafe.
Bucolic Lander has become hip, and there might be more high-end climbing coaches—between Climb Strong, Power Company, and SUBSTR8—than any similarly sized Western town. The cragging is convenient, with the pocketed Dolomite of Sinks Canyon a short drive from downtown, offering long, amazing sport routes and bouldering on granite and sharp, old-school limestone. And the legendary pocket-tugging mecca of Wild Iris is only a half-hour away. It’s like Boulder, Colorado, in terms of climbing convenience, but without all the superannuated, kid-hating, Tesla-driving narcissists or the fact that even a starter home costs $1 million—median home prices in Lander were in the high $300s as of summer 2024. The kids will likely clamor to see Popo Agie Falls, a natural waterslide into a swimming hole, or the canyon’s eponymous “Sinks,” where the river disappears into a subterranean cave.
Say what you want about the kitsch factor in Leavenworth, which remade itself as a touristy Bavarian village in the early 1960s, but it’s nothing if not a hoot. I mean, where else in North America can you get the full sauerkraut, bratwurst, schnitzel, giant pretzels, beer steins, polka band, and lederhosen experience—not to mention a 2,700-foot long alpine coaster, the Tumwater Twister—while still having access to some of the country’s best climbing. Check out the granite boulders and cliffs of the surrounding Cascades, in particular Icicle Canyon. Or head to Prusik Peak in the Enchantments, which is home to a classic 5.9 Fred Beckey, the Beckey-Davis, as well as a new-school 5.14a finger crack. If you’re thinking of moving here and feeling priced out, widen that Zillow search to include the nearby and more modest Wenatchee, at the foot of the range.
North Conway is a historic climbing center, with a longstanding traddy flavor on Cathedral and Whitehorse Ledges and—a scenic hour away—adventure climbing aplenty on the 1,000-foot slab of Cannon Cliff, New England’s highest cliff. Meanwhile, winter brings epic ice and mixed climbs (e.g., the Black Dike in Franconia Notch) and skiing, both resort and backcountry. For kids, there are attractions like the Conway Scenic Railroad and—though it’s heresy to some—a drive up the Mount Washington Auto Road to the 6,288-foot summit. And, if you’re up for full “family fun” tourist immersion, there are Santa’s Village in Jefferson and Story Land in Glen, where you can splish-splash in the “Moo Lagoon,” a splashpad experience described—predictably—as “udderly amazing.”
St. George is surrounded by cragging and bouldering, from the easy-access, Red Rock-like sandstone of Chuckawalla Wall, Turtle Wall, and Snow Canyon State Park, to the pay-to-play basalt climbing resort of Veyo Pool and Crawdad Canyon, to the sandstone blocks of Moe’s Valley, to more limestone nearby than you could climb in a lifetime, including famous venues like the Hurricave, the Wailing Wall, the Diamond, and the Virgin River Gorge. It also has a relatively mild climate, a small population (~100,000 people), and a somewhat-reasonable median home price of around $500K. St. George has a minor reputation as a spring-break town, but there’s also plenty of family-friendly stufflike the carousel in Town Square Park, the Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm, and a day trip to Zion National Park.
Stowe, Vermont, is a postcard-perfect New England town, the kind with the quaint Main Street and church steeple you’d see in a Hallmark (or Stephen King!) movie. In summer, it has family-friendly activities like hiking, swimming at Lake Elmore State Park, stand-up paddling on Waterbury Reservoir, and tackling the 50 miles of mountain-bike trails. And, in winter, for snowhounds, there is Stowe Mountain Resort, with its two peaks of Mount Mansfield (Vermont’s high point, at 4,395 feet) and Spruce Peak offering 116 trails and 2,360 feet of drop. But for climber families, the main draw will be the bouldering and ice climbing in Smuggler’s Notch, the former in a klettergarten of beautiful schist blocks nestled in the hardwood forest, the latter on a series of drips, seeps, and gullies that freeze solid in winter.
Northwest of Lake Tahoe, the bustling town of Truckee provides a perfect access point for the area’s legendary white, gray, and golden Sierra granite, from the roadside cragging of Donner Summit, to the treasure trove of Tahoe bouldering—so vast that it’s taken four guidebooks to document. For climbing families, Donner has splitter sport, trad, and bouldering with short approaches, while overall the region’s boulders tend to have chill, flat, pine-needle landings. Meanwhile, there are good aquatic options, with Donner Lake right in town offering 37 public docks as well as Donner Memorial State Park memorializing the infamous Donner Party, which resorted to cannibalism while snowbound here in winter 1846–1847. It’s a heckuva story to tell the kids—or, maybe better, visit the KidZone Museum!
Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of the Climbing Dictionary and the memoir Death Grip.
The post The 10 Best Family-Friendly Climber Towns in North America appeared first on Climbing.
