Climbing Walls in Cairns

Bouldering indoors and on the Esplanade

Defy Gravity Bouldering, on Cochrane Street in Manunda, is the city's indoor bouldering gym. It shares a site with Defy Gravity's trampoline park and indoor playground, and its walls run from vertical faces to a steep roof, with problems the staff keep resetting. It opens from noon to 8pm on weekdays, 9am to 6pm on Saturdays and noon to 6pm on Sundays, and its memberships let you bring a friend on a free pass about once a month.

The Cairns Esplanade Bouldering Park is free and open every day from 9am to 9:30pm. Cairns Regional Council looks after its sculpted boulders, which stand on soft-fall rubber under the fig trees of the Esplanade's Northern Activity Precinct, opposite Cairns Hospital; one is an arch whose roof you can cross hanging from the holds. The problems are colour-coded, and theCrag counts at least 16. There's nothing to hire, so bring shoes, chalk and a friend to spot you.

Roped climbing with the Cairns Climbing Club

For ropes there's the Cairns Climbing Club, a non-profit run by volunteers since 2016. It climbs in the tall hall of The Northern Outlook, an outdoor education centre on Redlynch Intake Road, about 9 km from the city centre on the way to Crystal Cascades. Climbing is on top ropes, belayed in pairs with a back-up belayer, plus a few auto-belays, and the bottom 3 metres of the walls can be bouldered. Monday nights, from 6pm to 8:30pm, are open to everyone, and your first visit must be on a Monday, when volunteers give you an induction and teach you to belay. A second night each week is for regular members. Everyone must book online beforehand, spectators included, as the hall holds 30 people.

Prices

The Esplanade boulders cost nothing. A night with the climbing club is $20 for adults and $16 for under-18s, with harness, helmet and shoes included; regulars pay a $40 annual fee ($16 with a concession card) that brings each night down to $16. Defy Gravity doesn't publish its prices online, so ask at the desk before your first session.

Kids and beginners

Defy Gravity runs climbing classes for children, and families can add the trampoline park on the same site to the visit. The climbing club has no minimum age and keeps very small harnesses, but it doesn't give lessons or look after children: parents climb with their children and learn to belay them, and the volunteers teach belaying from age 10 and back-up belaying from 8. Under-18s need a parent or guardian on their first visit.

Climbing in the heat and the wet season

Cairns is warm all year: at the airport, average afternoon highs range from about 26°C in July to 31.5°C in December and January. The wet season brings more than 400 mm of rain a month from January to March, against less than 50 mm a month from June to October, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Heavy rain can cancel the club's nights, because the causeway to The Northern Outlook floods quickly, so check its Facebook group before setting out on a wet evening. The Esplanade boulders are shaded by fig trees and open until 9:30pm, so you can climb them after the heat of the day, and the free, lifeguarded Esplanade Lagoon is a safe place to cool off afterwards.

For climbing outdoors, the season is the cooler, drier months from May to September: theCrag calls winter's conditions near perfect, and more than half the ascents climbers log there fall between May and August.

Outdoor climbing near Cairns

The online guide theCrag lists more than a thousand climbs around Cairns, nearly all of them boulder problems, on coastal granite, in river gorges and up on the Atherton Tablelands. The main areas are:

• Barron Gorge, in Barron Gorge National Park between Caravonica and Kuranda: hundreds of problems on hard metamorphosed mudstone beside Barron Gorge Road, and a few sport and trad routes near the hydro power station. The road has been closed to public vehicles while Cairns Regional Council repairs landslips from the Cyclone Jasper floods, so check the council's works page and theCrag's access notes before you go.
• North Wangetti, usually called Turtle Cove: an 8 km stretch of granite boulders on the beaches beside the Captain Cook Highway between Wangetti and Oak Beach. Check the tides first, as high water rules out some problems.
• The northern beaches: smaller boulder fields at Trinity Beach, Palm Cove and the Yorkeys Knob headland.

Barron Gorge is Djabugay country, in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. In Queensland's parks, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service asks climbers to use only the anchors provided, never to install or replace bolts without its written authority (an offence under the Nature Conservation Act 1992), to stay off wet rock and to check its park alerts before setting out. The guide also warns of crocodiles at coastal and riverside crags and stingers in the sea, and points newcomers to the Cairns Rock Climbing group on Facebook to meet local climbers. For walls elsewhere in the state, including Innisfail's free boulder wall and Urban Climb in Townsville, see the Queensland page.