A group of climbers at the Brooklyn Boulders gym. Photograph by Jake Naughton/The New York Times/Redux

Kevin Jorgeson spent the better part of a month swaddled in Gore-Tex in a tent suspended twelve hundred feet above the Yosemite Valley floor, eating dry salami sandwiches and bathing with baby wipes. It’s no wonder, then, that he didn’t own a suit until recently. But on a cold night in late January, two weeks after completing his historic nineteen-day ascent up the sheer rock face of Yosemite’s Dawn Wall, Jorgeson was ensconced in the cluttered back room of the Brooklyn Boulders climbing gym, discussing the finer points of men’s tailoring. “I’m thirty and I didn’t own a suit until last night,” he said, grinning. “I’m gonna rock that shit.” The suit in question—a blue Ralph Lauren number from Barneys—was a sign of how much Jorgeson’s life had changed since he and his partner, Tommy Caldwell, completed perhaps the most difficult climb in the world. It was a coming-of-age moment for the sport of climbing as well, and many in the outdoor industry are hoping that the pair’s feat proves to be the moment the sport breaks out of its crunchy bubble and into the broader consciousness. The Dawn Wall project, after all, had been a national sensation, with interactive graphics tracking Jorgeson and Caldwell’s progress and Anderson Cooper inquiring about the particulars of their mountainside bathroom routine on live television.

Once the province of adventurers living out of their cars, climbing has experienced something of a transformation in the past few years. Gyms with rock walls, formerly clustered in places like Boulder, the Bay Area, and the Seattle region, have proliferated nationwide. Climbing has turned into the new squash or tennis for a certain young professional set, projecting an air of health-conscious cool less frenetic than Crossfit and grittier than SoulCycle.

A recent study by the Outdoor Industry Association estimated that this urban demographic now accounts for thirty-three per cent of spending in the outdoor market, even if many in that number have yet to venture onto a real rock face. (The O.I.A. tracks sales trends in apparel and equipment for activities that run the gamut from trail running to indoor climbing, though does not make the break-out numbers for individual markets public.) By way of comparison, what the study calls “outdoor natives”—people who wear Tevas year-round, for example, or go on jaunts to Annapurna—make up only seventeen per cent of spending on gear and clothing. Which means there’s plenty of money to be made from climbing’s drift into the mainstream.

Four years ago, Greg Thomsen, a longtime climber and the managing director of Adidas’s outdoor-sports division in the U.S., saw that the field was dominated by heritage brands like Patagonia and North Face, and decided to take a different tack**.** “For us to really compete and to be unique and meaningful and different, we would have to focus on a younger, next-generation outdoor athlete,” Thomsen says. “The twentysomethings who haven’t ventured out to the big mountains.” Thomsen and his team focussed on urban rock-climbing hobbyists as their base. “We thought we should immediately get heavily involved with rock-climbing gyms, because that was going to be the future of the outdoor sport.”

The first indoor climbing gyms in the U.S. opened in the nineteen-eighties, but the industry has had its most robust growth in the past decade, with hundreds of gyms opening around the country. According to Climbing Business Journal, there were three hundred and fifty-three commercial climbing facilities in the U.S. at the end of 2014, up nine per cent from the previous year. According to C.B.J.’s Mike Helt, 2015 is likely to see a fifteen-per-cent spike in that tally. “Gym developers are starting to realize that they don’t need outdoor climbing or an outdoor-climbing community to have a successful climbing gym,” Helt wrote in an e-mail. He noted that, since 2010, the industry has been growing in nontraditional areas like the South, and is booming in the the Midwest, where rocky terrain is scarce and so, until recently, were its associated recreational pursuits. The key to the success of this model, most industry experts seem to agree, is a Millennial enthusiasm for group activities, Robert Putnam be damned.

The outdoor market wasn’t always so ripe for mainstream ventures. In 1987, Nike introduced its ACG line (All Conditions Gear), with Thomsen at the helm. “It was launched to be more performance oriented,” he says. “But within a short period of time it morphed into more warm-up suits.” Nike was more interested in tailoring its line to fashion trends, rather than to the exacting standards of the outdoors world, and the brand never caught on with specialty stores. ACG exists today, but in much different form than its original conception; its clothes are “designed for city terrain.” A key failure in his Nike strategy, Thomsen says, was not investing in what he calls “foundation shops,” purveyors that sell only specialty gear. ACG mostly sold in sporting-goods and department stores, and **“**as soon as that fashion changed a little bit they were onto the next,” he says. “Whereas foundation outdoor stores never left it.”

When he joined with Adidas, Thomsen courted climbing’s gatekeepers, spending the first two or three years building up the brand’s reputation in specialty shops. “Stores started realizing that if they don’t support a new brand that’s trying to bring them new customers, their old brands will just keep aging,” he said. The new generation of potential climbers, as Thomsen puts it, “don’t want to wear their grandparents’ down jacket.” A recent industry study noted that the young professional demographic identifies more with mainstream athletic brands than traditional outdoor ones. (“They were raised on team sports,” according to the report, “and don’t see themselves as outdoorsy.”) As climbing has grown in popularity, brands both new and old have aligned themselves with many of the sport’s top figures: Jorgeson is sponsored by Adidas, and Tommy Caldwell is with Patagonia.

When Jorgeson visited Brooklyn Boulders, it was a Friday night and the house was packed. He wore out two Sharpies signing autographs for ruddy Brooklynites in quilted coats and fleece hats who were entertained, at various points, by a funk band and an acrobat writhing on aerial silks to Sia’s “Elastic Heart.” “You look around, how many people are climbing right now?” Lance Pinn, a co-founder of the facility, asked over the din. “Are we selling climbing or are we selling this vibe?” Actually, quite a few people were scaling walls, but the larger convivial spirit afoot was one that marketers like Thomsen are counting on for future success. “This whole generation’s grown up being more social, liking to put their photos and their profiles out there to the world,” Thomsen says. “These are the new Facebook climbing gyms.”

Sasha DiGiulian is one of the more high-profile female climbers in the world; in addition to multiple awards and records, her online presence is of particular interest to her sponsor Adidas. DiGiulian has more than a hundred thousand Instagram followers and close to two hundred thousand fans on Facebook. Given that climbing has banked its future on word-of-mouth virality, social media is key. The Dawn Wall’s unprecedented popularity wasn’t simple serendipity—Jorgeson and Caldwell documented the climb on Facebook and Instagram, including self-filmed videos that played like reality-show confessionals, while hired photographers and videographers documented their moves up close and on the Valley floor.