Utah is becoming a factory for international ice-climbing champions.
In Liechtenstein at the end of January, youth athletes from 12 countries competed in the Ice Climbing Youth World Championships. Standing on both the gold and silver podiums for speed and lead climbing were two teenagers from Utah.
As of 2026, more than half of the national youth team for ice climbing is trained in Salt Lake City, and it’s largely thanks to one gym.
That gym, The Scratch Pad, hosted an event on Presidents Day, celebrating its athletes who had recently competed abroad.
The Scratch Pad: Built in Orem, Utah
After summiting Denali, Dustin Lyons and Susan Simms had the idea of putting together a dry-tooling gym, where they could continue ice climbing without the ice.
Lyons had a warehouse space in Orem, and Simms had dry-tooling holds, so they got to work.
The gym quickly “evolved from being a training facility for us and a few others into the idea of a dry-tooling gym,” Lyons told the Deseret News.
After visiting one of the only other dry-tooling gyms in the country, Lyons reached out to coaches at Momentum, a local rock climbing gym. He asked if they had any youth who would be interested in joining an ice-climbing team.
Conner Bailey, now 14 years old, was interested. Then Landers Gaydosh, now 16, joined next.
Just four months after joining The Scratch Pad, Gaydosh won his first world championship. “He had a really good, strong foundation in rock climbing, and then we put tools in his hand, taught him how to use them, then he won a world championship,” Lyons said.
Gaydosh has now won three world championships.
A rough patch for the dry-tooling gym
It’s not been completely smooth sailing for The Scratch Pad.
After a little while, Simms left the business, and Lyons tried to keep it running by himself. It was a rough transitional period, and it was “pretty clear the original building we were in was not sustainable.”
Lyons had to decide, “Do I want to keep it open? Do I want to move it? Do I just close it down and call it quits?”
“I didn’t want to give up on the dream and the athletes. I wanted to keep it going,” he said. “So I decided that we would move the gym and reopen. I started looking for another location and ultimately found the Bountiful location where we’re at now.”
Lyons disassembled everything at the old gym, stored most of it at a friend’s house, then started putting it back together. Reassembly began in September 2023.
Putting the gym back together was slow, since Lyons has a full-time job he works from 9-to-5. “It was almost every Saturday and Sunday and quite a few weeknights that I spent up there just building the walls, getting everything moved and ready,” he said.
The Bountiful location opened in April 2024.
From physical therapy to the podium
At the most recent Ice Climbing Youth World Championships, two of Lyons’ athletes came away with gold medals. Mathias Olsen, 14, won gold in speed and silver in lead, while Conner Bailey won the reciprocal: gold in lead and silver in speed.
Bailey’s mom, Tessie, was with her son in Liechtenstein when he won. She told the Deseret News, “I will say, I’m not much of a crier, but I — just thinking about how far we’ve come ...”
Tessie adopted Conner and his older brother when Conner was 2 years old. He’d been born underweight and had a curvature of the spine that required careful monitoring. Having ice climbed herself, Tessie introduced the sport to her son as a form of physical therapy.
She and her husband decided to move their family to Utah from Texas “so he could be closer to the training facilities,” and so her family could “be closer to skiing, climbing and the outdoors.”
“To me, it’s sort of like what I see as a healthy environment for where kids should grow up,” she said. “I love Utah, and I want my kids to have a similar experience as me.” Tessie added that Conner has “found things I didn’t even know existed. He’s gone much further.”
It comes down to a love of ice
Lyons started climbing in the mid-1990s as a teenager, living in Provo.
“I love that ice climbing is very challenging. It’s very unique,” he said. “It takes more thought going into it rather than just rock climbing. There’s a lot more mental challenge that goes into ice climbing in terms of being focused and reading the ice and knowing and understanding the medium of ice. It’s not just grabbing holds that are covered with chalk.”
He continued, “Ice is always changing, so you can climb the same climb days apart, and it can feel totally different. So it’s just beautiful. There’s just something about climbing a frozen waterfall that is kind of amazing. It’s like climbing a moment frozen in time.”
Ice climbing could join the Winter Olympics in 2030
The UIAA and World Ice Climbing have been advocating for ice climbing to be admitted as an official sport in the 2030 Olympic Games, set to take place in the French Alps.
If the sport is included, both Conner Bailey and Mathias Olsen told the Deseret News they hope to compete.
In 2030, “I’ll be old enough,” Bailey said. “So until then, I’ll just keep competing and training, and I’ll try to do it as long as I can, because I really love the sport and the community.”
Lyons added, “I’ve already started conversations with people in Salt Lake about it for 2034.”
“There’s still there’s still quite a bit of work that needs to go into it, but I think there’s a concerted effort to move it into the Olympics in 2030 and 2034,” he said.
A final decision on the 2030 program is expected by the IOC in June.
