My husband and I have been climbing for years. Thankfully climbing is a cheap sport that doesn’t require a lot of gear and there aren’t a lot of consumables. In fact, a lot of people live in vans, climbing almost year round and living on next to nothing. Check out camp 4 in Yosemite for what I’m talking about.
Anyway, he’s way more into climbing than I am and I always struggle to figure out what to buy him for his birthday. He clearly likes when I give him climbing gifts but it can be hard to figure out what to get since he buys all the gear and I don’t really know much about it (and I don’t have time to figure it out). The best approach seems to be to buy items that are ancillary to climbing but aren’t climbing gear. If I buy him a $200 rope and it’s not the right one, well, that’s a waste of $200 because they are non-returnable and no one wants to buy them used, even if they aren’t actually used yet.