What’s being called the first, permanent deep water solo wall in the world is now open at the U.S. Whitewater Center near Charlotte, North Carolina. The new wall is part of a the U.S. National Whitewater Center’s sprawling outdoor adventure center that includes two other climbing walls, one reaching 30 feet (underneath a covered awning), and a spire topping out at 46 feet. The center is also home to numerous water sports and high-ropes courses. The deep water solo wall at the US Whitewater Center. Photo: KeyserSoze128 via Reddit
The deep water solo walls, which range from 25 to 45 feet tall and are perched over a 20-foot deep pool, were built in an effort to connect with the next generation of climber. Eric Osterhus, Communications & Brand Manager for the center, told CBJ, “We recognize Deep Water Solo as a growing trend in the climbing community and feel strongly that offering it at the USNWC will continue to grow our mission of promoting healthy, active lifestyles.”
The deep water walls are open to the public now and will be showcased at the upcoming outdoor festival called, Tuckfest, which features a $15,000 prize purse. “We believe there’s a lot of opportunity for this sport to grow tremendously in the next few years, and we’re excited that the USNWC will offer the first permanent Deep Water Solo climbing complex of its kind in the world,” Osterhus said.
There have been other deep water solo competitions in the US, most notably Chris Sharma’s Psicobloc which is held at the Olympic Park in Park City, Utah. That wall, which is 50 feet tall, is not permanent and is build on-site before each event. Psicobloc has been held during the summer Outdoor Retailer show in nearby Salt Lake City, however the sprawling trade show is planning to move out of Utah in 2018 amid controversy over the state’s environmental stances.
Outside the Rock Dump. Photo: Juneau Empire
Sometime before July 1st, Juneau, Alaska’s only climbing gym, The Rock Dump, needs to find a new home. The gym has been in its current location since opening, and now, after ownership changes and the end of a sweetheart of a lease, the gym is being forced to relocate or go out of business.
The 11,000 square foot gym was opened by Matthew Cecil in 2001. He sold the building in 2012 to Alaska Coach Tours, who then rented it to Juneau Climbing and Recreation, a new non-profit formed by local climbers, which took over operations of the gym.
Since the transition, the future of the gym has been uncertain. The JCR board wrote in an open letter to the community, “The partnership was intended to be short-term, but every year Alaska Coach continued to renew the lease and to subsidize the rent.” They went on to write, “The Rock Dump would not have been able to remain open for the last 4+ years if it had not been for the support of Alaska Coach Tours.”
When Alaska Coach Tours initially bought the building they didn’t have immediate needs for it, so rather than keeping it unoccupied, they agreed to rent the space to JCR for less than market value, until the operators could find another location.
Unfortunately, that search did not turn up any viable options, and time is running out. Last November Alaska Coach Tours informed JCR that they couldn’t continue subsidizing the climbing gym, whose rent does not cover the company’s mortgage on the building.
According to the Juneau Empire, Alaska Coach Tour’s president, Dennis McDonnell, said that the company had put development for the building plans on hold for years “without any regrets”. They company felt that helping to keep the town’s only rock climbing gym open was the right thing to do for the community. “We are more than satisfied with the thought that we helped keep this gym going both operationally and financially,” McDonnell wrote.
In a Tuesday phone call to Juneau Empire, JCR board member Tyler Gress said the organization is looking for a profitable alternative, which could mean downsizing to a bouldering gym. A new building comparable to their current location would cost upward of $1 million, according to Gress. That is beyond the organizations reach; the gym has not been profitable for years and was only able to stay in business because of Alaska Coach Tour’s generous support.
McDonnell has now agreed to allow the group to stay in the building until July 1, giving JCR a little more time to find an alternative. Gress said the group’s priority right now is maintaining continuity for members: They want to find a space to move into right away so they can transition their members to a new facility without a break in service.
The new style of geometry-assisted braking devices. Photo: Mammut.
The small island nation of Singapore, with its 5.6 million citizens, has two bouldering-only gyms and three full-service traditional climbing gyms packed into a busy urban core. The climbing scene is usually tight-knit, but a recent policy change regarding belay devices has created some unusual animosity between the gyms and their members.
The three Singapore rope gyms, Climb Central, Climb Asia and the largest, Onsight Climbing, came together to create a policy they thought would lead to a safer gym experience and reduction in ground falls. The new policy completely bans tubular (a.k.a tube-style or tuber) belay devices, such as the classic Black Diamond ATC, in favor of Assisted Braking Devices (ABD) such as the Petzl Grigri, Elrid Jul and Mammut Smart, among others. Not surprisingly the new policy is rubbing an outspoken group of members the wrong way.
The operators anticipated that a few climbers would be resistant to the change. But they were caught off guard by the number and passion of climbers behind the resistance. Looking back, they now know they could have handled the roll-out of the new policy in a better way.
Safety First
It is almost inevitable that every climbing gym, sooner or later, will experience a ground fall from a sport climber. Sometimes the outcome is a bruised heel, but sometimes the accident ends tragically with a broken back and paraplegia. Like every responsible gym operator, Onsight Climbing’s General Manager, Ben Toh, is always looking for ways to mitigate the number of accidents at his facility. Onsight opened its doors in 2011, and since that time the gym has had four major incidents, all of which occurred while climbers were using tubular devices while belaying, according to Toh. “The cause is overwhelmingly due to belayers’ inability to hold on to the rope, for various reasons such as – inattentiveness, inability to react fast enough, insufficient strength to hold on to the rope because of high impact fall, or simply tardiness,” Toh told CBJ.
“Four may not seem like a big number,” Toh wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “But we feel it is unacceptable, especially when the technology to prevent [these accidents] has already existed for years, and has proven its efficacy.” Toh is aware that banning tubers does not equate to zero incidents, but, “We believe it will lead to less,” he wrote.
Device Innovation
Tube-style belay devices like the Black Diamond ATC, Petzl Verso and Trango’s Pyramid have been a standard in climbing equipment since the late 1980’s when they surpassed the figure 8 to become the most popular belay device. Today’s tube-style models have added grooves and teeth to improve their performance, but they still function in the exact same way as the original devices.
In 1991 Petzl revolutionized the belay market with its Assisted Braking Device, the Grigri, which is now ubiquitous in gyms and sport crags around the world. The Grigri and others, like the Trango Vergo and the Edelrid Eddy, use a mechanized internal cam to “lock” the rope in place during a fall. Petzl is now releasing a third version of the Grigri which includes an anti-panic function where the device locks if the release handle is pulled too hard while lowering, which is by far the leading cause of ground falls when using an ABD like the Grigri.
A few years ago the assisted-braking market expanded to include belay devices that are shaped in a way that allows the device and the locking carabiner to slow down the rope in the event of a fall. These new devices use the geometry of the device, instead of a moving part (like a cam) to jam the rope and assist in stopping a climber’s fall. These “geometry-assisted” devices, such as the Mammut Smart, Edelrid Jul, and the upcoming Black Diamond Pilot, have no moving parts but are still considered in the same ABD family as the Grigri.
Traditional tube-style and newer assisted-braking belay devices
Stats
As stated above, Toh can point to his own gym’s incident statistics as proof of the “error rate” of traditional tubers. He can also point to a 2012 German research paper that came to the same conclusion. The German Alpine Club (DAV), conducted a comprehensive belay safety study amongst eleven German climbing gyms and reported their findings in the Journal of the German Alpine Club.
After observing more than 360 people climbing and belaying they counted all known safety and relevant climbing and belaying errors. The researchers concluded that “The semi-automatic belay devices showed an increased margin of safety in their application.” They went on to conclude, “It became clear that Tube users commit a serious error in every second belay action while such errors showed up only every seventh time with semi-automatics.”
(They also found the climbing partners don’t do safety checks and stand too far away from the wall when lead belaying.)
It’s interesting to note that long-time German climbing gear manufacturer, Edelrid, released a statement in 2015 saying, “In the new 2016 collection, we are removing all dynamic tubers from our range.” By ‘dynamic’ they mean traditional tube-style devices.
In the United States, the Climbing Wall Association, the trade group for climbing wall operators, does not endorse any particular type or brand of belay device. Though the CWA makes no mention of the new breed of geometry-assisted braking devices, in their Climbing Wall Instructor Program they do “recommend teaching belaying using a passive device first and then, once that type of device is mastered, to introduce the mechanical-assist device to the novice climber.”
The CWA policy goes on to state that, “Mechanical assist devices are more complex mechanisms, more complicated to use, are counter-intuitive in some respects (use of the cam lever to lower the climber) and require additional training to use properly, especially for lowering, descending or belaying a leader.”
Belay On?
It’s hard to argue with stats, but many of Onsight’s members are extremely upset with the new policy. They argue that tube devices are safe and point to their many accident-free years using them. They also point out that all the accidents that have happened in the gym have been caused by human error, not by a malfunction of the device.
One Facebook commenter wrote, “If the cause of accidents are due entirely … to human error and not equipment failure, as in the case of your gym’s statistics, does it not make better sense to seek to better educate errant users of the ATCs and possible[ly] seek to revoke their … certifications?” Toh doesn’t dispute this fact but believes that education is not enough. “Even with heightened education, incidents can still happen due to factors not within control of the belayer. That is when using an ABD will help,” he replied on the gym’s Facebook page.
Some members of the gyms with the new belay device policy have even gone so far as to create a Change.org petition to stop the ban on tube devices. At the time of this publishing the petition had 228 supporters.
For Toh, knowing that accidents are going to happen no matter which belay device climbers use leads to a simple evaluation of which device will result in fewer accidents in the event of user error. “It is impossible to have no incidents regardless of the device being used. But statistically, looking at the number of incidents using ABD’s vs non-ABD’s, there should be lower number of incidents with respect to failure to hold on to the breaking end of the rope,” he wrote on Facebook.
How to make a new policy
After the Singapore gyms rolled out the new policy, they saw hundreds of comments on their Facebook pages regarding the change, mostly from members that were either confused or angry. Because of the close and personal nature of climbers’ relationship with their home gym, it is not particularly uncommon for members to be very vocal about changes. For Toh, this vocal response was not all bad. “Hot passion, is better than cold indifference,” he said.
Toh and the other Singapore gyms expected some negative response from members, but not to the extent of what transpired. He understands now that the policy change is controversial but more importantly the way they enacted the change did not help.
“Our messaging was really bad,” Toh told CBJ. He said that they should have started introducing ABDs in the gym, educating climbers about proper and safe use of the devices, and highlighting their advantages. “This may have helped some of the climbers understand where we are coming from, and allowed them a first-hand experience with the devices,” he said.
“Our first notice that went out, on hindsight, was too casual.” The first notice was a simple blog and social media statement about certain dates to take note of regarding the policy change. “We should have indicated a) reasons for the ban, b) the interim measures, c) assurances that the transition will be minimally disruptive and d) a simple Q&A about the ABDs,” Toh said. One particular issue among his climbers after the notice went out, was that the cost of ABDs will be prohibitively expensive. “It is a simple issue that we could have addressed right from the start,” he said.
Climb Central originally put out a similar notice of dates and workshops. A day later a “Why the Change” update was published that stated in more detail the reasons why they were banning tubers.
Facing a firestorm of negativity and cancellation threats, Toh knew he would have to get out there and win the hearts and minds of his members. “Having screwed up so badly, the next best thing was to engage our climbers individually (on FB and at the gym),” he said. And that’s what he’s doing now. He now spends two to three hours every day responding to social media comments and talking face to face with members in the gym. “We actually appreciate the opportunity to interact with our climbers, and see it from their point of view,” he said.
The Singapore climbing community is small but robust, and for Toh, leaving them out of the conversation about belay devices was a huge mistake. They are passionate about climbing and about safety and he’s now glad that they are having a valuable conversation with the climbing community.
“Overall, the whole fiasco was a good wake-up call to the [local] gyms, that the local climbing community is a stakeholder in our business.”
UKC international news editor and organizer of the event Björn Pohl told UK Climbing, “It’s without a doubt the hardest project in the world inside or out. At the same time, it’s set in such a way that it’s possible to try for any average Joe.”
The route starts at about V0 (6a French) gets progressively harder with moves at the top nearing V15 (8c). “Not sure what that adds up to, no one does, but probably French 10 something,” Pohl said. The route will have approximate grades along the way, making it possible to measure one’s progress. (An earlier version of this article mistakenly used a route grade conversion from French to V-scale when it should have been a bouldering conversion.)
“As the route is permanent it will now for the first time in climbing history be possible to have a world record, which everyone can try to beat. It will, of course, be possible to have all sorts of records based on countries, regions, cities, gender, age and so on.”
The launch event was held February 18th and live streamed on Facebook.
Posted by Black Diamond on Saturday, February 18, 2017
Whoever holds the record on the last day of the year gets €1000 and should anyone top it, the reward is €5000, a sum that will keep growing every year. Anybody can try the route but to be eligible for the prize money the climber must by filmed.
Some very strong boulderers like Nalle Hukkataival, Stefano Ghisolfi, Kajsa Rosén, Magnus Midtbø and Jorg Verhoeven have attempted the route without topping. Only time will tell if this project really is the hardest route in the world.
For you setters that want to waist several hours, the prolific vlogger, Eric Karlsson was in Stockholm documenting every day of the setting process with Robert Rundin and Jocke Berglund (who are also the setters behind the Legends Only comp).
With indoor climbing’s continued trend in popularity some facilities are feeling the strain of overcrowding. The most obvious next step for owners of facilities bursting at the seams is to open another location. Waiting until lines for ropes are long and bouldering areas become congested can turn off customers that otherwise become members, but pulling the trigger on a new facility is a complicated and expensive proposition.
There are several important factors when thinking about growing your brand within your local market. The most obvious question to answer is, ‘Just where should I build?’.
A new gym should be far enough away to attract new members, but if need be, close enough to encourage some members to migrate to the new gym. When done right it expands the business and keeps members climbing rather than waiting for their turn on the wall. The trick is finding the sweet spot where a new location grows total membership rather than swaps it from one location to another.
The Time to Grow
Before considering a new location a gym owner should have a sizeable customer base and enough funds available for what should be an expected dip in customers at the original location.
Triangle Rock Club Managing Partner Joel Graybeal told CBJ, “You will definitely lose memberships when you get too busy.” Not long after they opened their first facility in Morrisville, NC, it got to a point where people were waiting in lines for ropes and if it was too busy some customers would turn around and drive away rather than join the lines at the already packed gym.
To alleviate this problem, Graybeal and his team decided to open a new facility in North Raleigh, twenty minutes from the Morrisville location. He knew that the new location would siphon climbers from the original gym, but said, “We knew we were and we needed to.”
The plan worked. The initial migration delivered a loss in memberships and revenue to the original Morrisville location, but it also helped alleviate congestion. After a later expansion at the Morrisville location, they saw another, smaller migration from the North Raleigh gym back to the Morrisville location.
Each space has since grown its membership base despite a bit of overlap. The proximity allows for a flow of members between locations, but with hindsight Graybeal thinks it would have been better if the gyms were slightly farther apart so as to reach a wider geographic area. “I would have ideally located another 10 minutes further,” he said.
Triangle has a unique perspective in regards to the effects of new facility locations. They recently opened their third gym an hour away from the Raleigh area in Fayetteville, NC. Because it’s a significant distance away Graybeal said there has been no migration from their other gyms.
Going the Distance
“People hate driving,” St. Louis-based Upper Limits Founder Chris Schmick said. “If it’s over 20 minutes it’s too far.” That rule of thumb has guided Schmick on where to expand within the St. Louis community.
Upper Limits has three gyms, each about 20 minutes apart. Schmick has found this distance to be ideal, whereas Graybeal from Triangle Rock Club finds that the magic number is about 30 minutes.
Schmick started with his first gym in downtown St. Louis and the next one was in Maryland Heights, about 20 minutes west. There was some migration to the new location, but many of the college students in the downtown area remained there. Some of this is likely due to the fact that cash-strapped college kids often don’t have their own transportation, but larger demographic factors also played a role.
“People from the downtown area would not come down [to Maryland Heights],” Schmick said. “Which I found kind of surprising.” Schmick admits there was a recovery period after the second gym opened, but “the customer base built itself up around the new gyms.”
Each gym ended up having its own demographic, which gave Schmick the opportunity to more easily target each group with his marketing. At the downtown gym his team markets to college students, and at their newer locations in the suburbs, they shifted their focus to families.
What has helped to make the gyms feasible as Schmick continued to push and open a third gym in Chesterfield, another 20 minutes west, was the name recognition of the Upper Limits brand. “It’s not like we’re starting from scratch,” Schmick said about opening new gyms. Though the regulars typically live or work close by, there are those who occasionally make a longer trip and it’s as if they are just waiting for a closer gym to open. It would seem that one of the biggest selling points is the convenience factor.
Distance, Time and Population
Something that appears to be a constant through the US market is the transportation time between gyms in metropolitan areas with a population between 1-2 million. In these cases, the population of a city doesn’t appear to carry as much weight on the number of gyms in an area as the population of the entire metropolitan area does.
According to CBJ’s research, 20 minutes, based on the average drive time measured between 50 gyms throughout the U.S, is average for gyms located in larger population centers. This doesn’t necessarily mean climbers will only drive 20 minutes to get to a gym, as each area of the country is different.
Mileage also seems to have little effect on how close some gyms are placed in relation to each other. A buffer of busy city streets in places like Chicago and New York City keeps the travel times high even when the gyms are only three or four miles apart. In these cases, it’s faster to walk, bike or take transit, especially when considering the logistics of finding a parking spot.
There are obviously outliers. In Jacksonville, FL there is just one gym. The city holds more than 850,000 people and the greater metropolitan area swells to 1.35 million. Boulder, CO, with a population slightly higher than 100,000 has three gyms, which is even farther from the norm. Most other cities, including New York, have between two and eight gyms.
In each city, if you simply based it on population and drive time from other gyms, there remains room to grow. Of course knowing where to put a new gym is only one part of the problem, knowing when to pull the trigger and how to finance the project are equally important elements.
Success Through Growth
It can help to have some cash on hand, but waiting until the project can be completely funded through existing cashflow is often too long to wait. For a Craig Burzynski, owner of Adventure Rock in Milwaukee, the time for expansion came when they had between 30-35 percent of funds they would need for the project.
Their newest location opened on the east side of Milwaukee about seven months ago, and targets the large demographic of young post-grads that call the city home. It’s about 28 minutes west of their first location, in Brookfield, which was at capacity. The expansion was accomplished after a couple other projects fell through on the owners. In the end they had to bite the bullet to get something that worked. “It was not affordable, it was available,” Burzynski explained. “It was kind of an ideal location for us.”
Most gym owners should expect a one or two year period before a new gym reaches a point of profitability. Based on the recent projects completed by Triangle Rock Club, Adventure Rock and Upper Limits, it can happen inside a year or as quickly as six months. This may be an indicator that less cash-on-hand is required for expansion, and that investing in future capacity is a wise move.
Graybeal offers some sage advice for brands looking to grow, “You can never save your way to success.”
Working at height.
In an effort to create safer working conditions for routesetters and others that are working at height in climbing facilities, the Climbing Wall Association has announced the release of a draft document called, CWA Work-at-Height Standard for Climbing Wall Operations.
Even though standards are commonplace in other high-access industries like construction and arboriculture, there has never been a professionally recognized set of common work practices for routesetters working in climbing gyms.
The purpose of the Work-at-Height Standard is to provide guidance to employers regarding their work-at-height program and ensure compliance with legal requirements. The standard will assist employers in identifying, evaluating and controlling the risks and hazards related to work-at-height in a climbing facility. The standard will also serve as the basis for certifying both competent and qualified climbing wall workers. The certification program will be voluntary.
The Work-at-Height Standard has been developed over the last two years in a collaborative effort by industry participants on the CWA Work-at-Height Certification Standards Committee. The committee has representatives from the U.S.A. and Canada and has sought input from leading industry experts, climbing equipment manufacturers, climbing gym owners, routesetters and other industry groups.
A Resource for Climbing Gym Operators
According to Bill Zimmermann, CEO of the CWA, this draft standard represents a great asset for the climbing wall industry. “The proposed CWA standard defines a range of equipment, access methods, and fall protection systems that can be used effectively to safeguard climbing wall workers anywhere,” he said. “Prior to the development of this standard, a business owner would need to spend days or weeks collecting the information needed to develop a comprehensive fall protection program for gym workers. The CWA standard, and the training program that supports it, now makes this task very straightforward.”
The new standard establishes an outline for a managed fall protection program for recreational climbing facilities and addresses definitions, employer duties and responsibilities, fall protection planning, equipment and rescue in a thorough and organized format. The training to accompany the standard was developed in partnership with the Petzl Technical Institute. The certification program will be delivered through a network of member program providers starting this spring.
The CWA is taking comments and feedback on the draft document. To review the draft and submit your comments on the document go to the CWA website. After the thirty-day public review and comment period is concluded, the CWA will issue an official version of the document.
The charge to boycott the upcoming Summer Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City is gaining traction as more outdoor industry companies follow Patagonia’s lead. The famous retailer, along with Black Diamond, has been encouraging other outdoor companies to protest public-lands positions promoted by Utah’s elected officials.
Patagonia and Black Diamond Equipment are pushing back against legislators in Utah who want to change President Barack Obama’s recent designation of a new Bears Ears National Monument in the state. Bears Ears is located in southeast Utah and is the first national monument proclamation to specifically acknowledge rock climbing as an appropriate and valued recreation activity.
In January, Utah, at the behest of Governor Herbert, announced plans to sue the federal government and in essence appeal to the new Trump administration to reverse the recent protection of Bears Ears, a site containing thousands of years of Native American archeological treasures and craggy red rocks beloved by climbers from all over the world.
Patagonia President and CEO Rose Marcario, in a press release announcing their boycott of the show, said that Governor Herbert’s actions to rescind the Bears Ears designation makes it “clear that he and other Utah elected officials do not support public lands conservation nor do they value the economic benefits – $12 billion in consumer spending and 122,000 jobs – that the outdoor recreation industry brings to their state.”
The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, also wrote an open letter calling on Utah’s governor not to work to transfer federal lands to the state. “Politicians in the state don’t seem to get that the outdoor industry—and their own state economy—depend on access to public lands for recreation,” Chouinard wrote.
The semi-annual OR Show, as it’s known, brings $50 million in direct spending to the state annually, Black Diamond founder Peter Metcalf said in an opinion piece published Tuesday in the Salt Lake Tribune.
Peak Designs, Kuhl, Power Practical and Polartec joined Arc’teryx last week with announcements to skip the twice-a-year show that has been held in Salt Lake City for two decades. Most recently Metolius also announced they would be joining the boycott.
Metolius Climbing was founded by climbers, for climbers, and places like the Bears Ears National Monument and the…
On the flip side of this boycott movement is a number of high profile companies that are calling for industry unity. REI, Ibex and The North Face have all announced they will be attending the show and hope other brands will join them. According to SNEWS, North Face President Scott Baxter thinks that the boycott “will only harm many of those smaller businesses that attend OR, many of which depend upon their time at the show.”
Similarly, REI Co-op CEO Jerry Stritzke wrote on the company’s blog that he “applaud[s] the action of Patagonia,” and the other brands boycotting the show but is advocating for companies to attend.
“I believe it would be a mistake for us not to gather as an industry this July. Now more than ever we need to act together to advocate and find a common voice to protect our most important asset — our public lands. To be clear, REI is strongly in the camp of moving OR if Utah persists in attacking our public lands – the sooner the better,” he wrote.
Not surprisingly, the main industry sponsor of the show, the Outdoor Industry Association, also wants companies to think long and hard about not attending. “As our industry has grown and matured, our voice has gotten stronger and louder. Our messages are reaching a broad audience and having impact with the public and with policymakers. But that impact will dissolve if we don’t stick together now. Boycotting the Outdoor Retailer show will hurt our industry and the credibility we’ve worked so hard to build,” the Board of Directors wrote on the organization’s website.
New Home For The Show
All of this comes on the heels of an announcement from Outdoor Retailer that the show will be actively exploring and soliciting proposals for a new venue for the show beginning in 2018.
In a statement last Monday, Outdoor Retailer’s Marisa Nicholson said, “We’ve been listening to the concerns from the industry and agree that it’s time to explore our options. Salt Lake City has been an incredible home to Outdoor Retailer and the outdoor community for the past 20 years, and we aren’t opposed to staying, but we need to do what’s best for the industry and for the business of outdoor retail.”
The Outdoor Retailer summer and winter shows, which are owned by the country’s largest business-to-business trade show operator, Emerald Expositions, have been in Salt Lake City since 1996, but their contract expires in 2018.
A typical day at the OR Show.
For years the OR Show has experienced growing pains with their current Salt Lake location and has asked the city to expand the Salt Palace convention center, where the event is held. In response, Salt Lake erected outdoor pavilions to accommodate the show’s growth and asked for a four-year contract renewal, which they received.
The last time the OR Show shopped around for a new home, cities such as Las Vegas, NV; Anaheim, CA; and Orlando, FL were in the running. Those locations were identified as being capable of hosting the Outdoor Retailer trade shows, which require a footprint in excess of 900,000 square feet for the summer gathering. To many industry insiders, Denver is the natural choice to host the show, but in the past, the city did not have enough convention space to accommodate the event.
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper told the Denver Post, that Denver now may be ready to host the show. The city has pledged more than $1 billion to expand the Western Show Complex event center near downtown. Hickenlooper, who has highlighted the importance of the outdoor industry to the state and to many residents and visitors, said the state would welcome the show and its participants.
Choosing a new host city requires careful consideration of factors that affect the tradeshow business, as Darrell Denny, Executive Vice President for Emerald Exposition’s Sports Group, explains: “Our responsibilities as producers of the Outdoor Retailer shows require us to consider all aspects of any city and state that may serve as host to the thousands of brands, retailers, media and others who make up the entire outdoor community. Those criteria include facilities, hotels, transportation, labor costs, environmental policies and the degree to which host states are in sync with outdoor industry values. This decision allows us to explore new venues while taking all of these factors into account. That said, Salt Lake City has been a welcoming and beneficial host to Outdoor Retailer for many years and will be among candidates to continue to be the host city.”
The second story of the former brewery and the future home of Ascend. Photo: Ascend
When the team behind Ascend, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, started the long road to opening their climbing gym, they had no idea just how long a road it would end up being. The facility, which will open doors next month, started with an idea back in 2011.
Local climbers Alex Bernstein and Paul Guarino had a passion for climbing that had developed at their local gyms and the nearby Red River Gorge. Even though they loved climbing they soon grew tired of the sharp corners and horizontal roofs at the gym and yearned for more amenities. After a visit to Mission Cliffs, a climbing gym in San Francisco operated by Touchstone, they knew that Pittsburgh needed a modern facility and had a hunch that other climbers felt the same way.
But with limited business experience (Bernstein had studied linguistics and Guarino had an MBA and managed a restaurant), the pair knew they would have to rely on their passion for climbing and their stick-to-it-ness if they were to finally succeed at opening a climbing gym.
The other hurdle they would have to get over would be helping people to look past the negative stigma of the rust-belt city and instead to see the potential return on a climbing gym.
A look at the bouldering area at Ascend. Photo: Ascend
The Education of a Gym Owner
It’s one thing to understand climbing and have a passion for it. It’s another thing completely to understand how to start a climing business and operate it successfully.
To be able to see their dream come true the Ascend team needed to do some serious studying. “Our first year was spent figuring out left from right. Honestly, we realized very quickly that we didn’t know much about the industry,” Guarino told CBJ earlier this year. “We went into it naively thinking we would build it ourselves. Which was the old model we were rebelling against!
Even though they knew in their hearts that a modern climbing gym would be successful, they also knew they would need some help getting there. So after some searching they found a start-up consulting package from climbing wall builder Rockwerx. The package, called GymCalc, includes software to help potential climbing gym owners flesh out a business plan and get a handle on the financials of running a climbing gym. Even though Ascend eventually contracted with Walltopia to build their walls and that the financial details now look very different, Guarino said the Rockwerx package “gave us the kick start that we needed.”
Once the team had a better understanding of the business of selling climbing they needed to raise the funds to make it happen. At first they approached venture capital firms and hoped for angel investors. But VC firms typically handle projects in the tens of millions and have strict requirements for high returns and relatively quick exit strategies that don’t fit well with the long-term nature of a climbing gym investment.
Through this sometimes painful process, they didn’t land any big deals but they did get some good advice: “This is a doctors, lawyers, and family friends type of project.” The size of facility Ascend was looking to build would need between two and four million dollars to complete. This “smaller” amount and a possible twenty-year return lends itself to people that are amateur investors that are equally passionate about bringing a gym to the area.
Getting their feet firmly planted and their heads on straight took the better part of a year. Their second year proved to be more fruitful. They landed their first investors and started the real estate search in earnest. Here they hit another setback. On multiple occasions, they found spaces that met their needs but in two instances the landlords backed out of the deals at the last second.
At this time the project was 50% funded and these delays seemed monumental. But looking back Bernstein said the delays “allowed us to surround ourselves with talented people and a board from all walks of life.” Even though they never found a particular climbing gym guru, they did have advisors from the finance and legal world and even a climber mom to help guide them through the process.
After almost five years of pushing the project forward by fits and starts, the team eventually ended up with a combination of funding sources: half came from private investment and the other half was a combination of a bank loan, a small loan from a private lender, plus the landlord’s contribution and a small loan from a community development organization.
Slow Growth
The Ohio River Valley, where Pittsburgh is located and also includes St. Louis, Cincinnati and Cleveland, has seen gym development on pace with the rest of the country. But Pittsburgh has up until now been left behind.
The area hasn’t seen a new climbing gym since The Climbing Wall (14,000 square feet of climbing) opened in 1992 in a Pittsburg suburb and in 1993 when Climb North (5,000 SFC) opened up fourteen miles north of downtown. These first-generation gyms have served their community well but over the last ten years have become outmoded.
Like most metro areas in the US, there were always rumors of new gyms coming in, but none ever came to fruition. From an industry perspective the Steel City was lacking interest from gym developers.
If other cities of a similar size are any indicator, Pittsburgh should have three to four commercial climbing facilities. Instead, they have two, small, out-dated rock gyms.
The reason is not a deficit of people. Pittsburgh has 305,000 people that reside inside the city limits and an additional 2 million that call the metro area home. The area also has a sizeable college student population which includes the University of Pittsburgh (28,769) and Carnegie Mellon (12,569) and thirty-eight other public colleges.
Pittsburgh also has six Fortune 500 companies that are headquartered in the city as well as a nascent tech hub for companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Intel.
But one problem that is hard to dismiss is the overall lack of growth in the city’s population. Although the State of Pennsylvania has experienced weak population growth since 1990, the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania including the Pittsburgh metro area have experienced weak population decline since the late 1960s; the region lost 81,000 residents from 2000 to 2010 (a three-percent decline). While the rate of decline within the region has slowed in recent years, the population levels are projected to remain relatively flat through 2019.
Pittsburgh and the SW section of PA is also one of the poorest areas in the state, and has seen big drops in household income level over the past several decades.
Declining population and dropping incomes are hard to look past, but the main reason no other gym has tried to open a modern gym in the city may have more to do with the lack of faith in the local economy. Early in the project, Guarino met with a local business owner who understood the outdoor retail market. After looking at the gym’s business plan he said Guarino was “chasing a dead dream”, and predicted that the project would never be successful.
That’s disheartening to hear, but it’s not uncommon for long-time, hardened locals to have a skeptical view of the city. Afterall, over the decades they’ve been through the ups and downs and feel they have a real grounded perspective of what will make it in their city.
But what the Ascend team saw that nobody else did was that the new breed of climbing center is not your father’s musty rock gym. Modern gym operators now market to fitness enthusiasts even more so than they do the die-hard rock climber. These facilities also have become a cultural fixture for urban Millennials, a population Pittsburgh has in spades.
Change of Plans
When they started the Ascend team had two criteria that were the foundation of their plans to open a climbing gym in Pittsburgh. One, they wanted to be in the city limits of Pittsburgh; and two, they wanted to open a full-service facility with bouldering and sport climbing. These two requirements, it turns out were not compatible.
The single biggest challenge owners face when starting a full-service climbing gym is not funding but instead finding the right real estate. Many first-time operators go into their search thinking it will be quick and easy, and Guarino’s team had the same expectation. Pittsburgh has to be full of old warehouses and manufacturing plants, they thought. But year after year of searching left them with nothing but wear on their tires and no viable properties to show for it.
Top-out section of bouldering. Photo: Ascend
They found that a lot of the former manufacturing plants were simply not there; many had been torn down years ago. Or they found that warehouses and outmoded plants require a lot of capital to rehab and make functional for a new business, let alone for the specific needs of a climbing gym.
If the team was going to succeed at opening a climbing gym, they would need to soften their stance on one of their two parameters; either move to the suburbs or look for a space to accommodate a bouldering-only facility. Since the team lived in the city and understood the traffic patterns and habits of Pittsburghers, they knew that the suburbs were not an option.
So the only other option was to downsize and try for a bouldering-only space. “That was at first really hard to swallow,” Guarino said. “Do we want to open a bouldering gym? We always thought a bouldering gym would come second.” Indeed, many potential gym owners have this same thought.
“It was an ego thing. We should have been looking for a bouldering gym space years ago,” he said. So after some soul searching Guarino and his partners decided to sign a fifteen-year lease on the second story of an old brewery building in the south part of town.
The 27,000 square foot space has twenty-four foot ceilings and a 300 foot wall of non-stop windows that look out at the Steel City. In addition to 10,500 square feet of climbing surface they will also have a full training area that includes a Moon Board, woody and campus boards. Other amenities include locker rooms, cardio and yoga areas and a stand-alone foot washing station as well as indoor and outdoor bike parking. They’ll even have a small sport climbing section to appease those Red River Gorge climbers that just need to clip a few bolts.
Perseverance
Many developers have written off Pittsburgh, but Guarino and Bernstein, and the rest of the Ascend team, believed in the city where they became climbers.
What these guys are hoping to prove is that if you have a passion for climbing and the fortitude to persevere through years and years of setbacks, one day you’ll be able to open the doors on your very own climbing gym.
These guys also have something a lot of potential gym owners lack: a lifelong connection to the very community they hope to serve. “Our goal to is to help it and make it better,” Bernstein said. “We appreciate the other gyms in the area and the region. Without those other gyms, many of us would not even be climbers. We own them something.”
On one hand, they wanted to build a place for that community to come together, and on the other they wanted to create a business that they could be proud of and where they could enjoy going to work everyday.
When Bernstein first thought about opening a gym he knew he wanted more than just gym. “I just felt like all of my friends are banging away on computers in law firms or consulting companies,” he told CBJ. “This is not an NGO in Africa, we’re not saving the world,” he went on to say, “it just seemed like a much more worthwhile experience than being a guy at a desk someplace.”
“I wanted to do something that let me have a much more positive impact on the community. To have people come in and walk away with a smile and tell people about our business. Everybody was working for a paycheck and I wanted to work for a community reputation.”
Earth Treks’ original gym, which opened in 1997, in Columbia, Maryland will soon be replaced by a 38,000 square foot climbing and fitness facility that is quadruple the size of the current space. The new gym will be housed in the same building where the current facility is located just in a different section of the building.
The design will include, what ET says is, the largest bouldering area in the state and up to 28,000 square feet of climbing. Also included in the design:
Dedicated yoga room and group fitness room
Expansive training area with multiple systems boards and hangboards
Climbing walls designed by Jason Kehl
High-end large locker rooms
State of the art, eco-friendly LED lighting
Workspace areas
“Twenty years ago we opened the Columbia climbing gym as a club house for our friends. It is so gratifying that from that small space, we’ve grown such a big community of climbers. Now, with five gyms spread from Columbia to Colorado, we’ve become one of the biggest operators in this industry. We now have more than three hundred employees and serve more than one million customers each year. With all the memories created in that facility, it will be sad to shut down the gym. But at the same time, we’ve learned so much about operating climbing and fitness centers that it is exciting to give our members and staff a bigger, brighter and in every way better new club house,” said Chris Warner, Earth Treks founder and CEO.
Earth Treks’ current Columbia facility (located at 7125 Columbia Gateway Drive) will remain open until the new facility is complete ensuring a seamless transition for all members.
