A new indoor rock-climbing gym is expected to open next year on Discovery Drive in Boalsburg.
Harris Township supervisors last week approved preliminary land development plans for the 12,000-square-foot facility to be constructed on Discovery Drive, pending completion of a traffic impact study.
Ohio-based Vertical Adventures is developing the gym, which co-owner Matt Roberts said will be called Climb Nittany. It will be the company’s fourth facility and first outside of Ohio.
Climb Nittany will have a maximum wall height of 42 feet and will have ropes and bouldering, Roberts said. The company had initially planned to break ground this fall, but the traffic study delayed those plans. Roberts said he expects to break ground in the spring and target a late 2019 opening.
Josh Helke, a State College area resident and owner of Organic Climbing in Philipsburg, was instrumental in bringing Vertical Advenutres to the area and is helping with planning for the gym. Helke’s company is a premier manufacturer of crash pads and other rock climbing products and he has been interested in bringing a dedicated rock climbing facility to the area for years.
But as his business has grown — Organic Climbing recently opened a 17,000 square-foot, solar-powered manufacturing facility in Moshannon Valley Regional Business Park — Helke realized his business couldn’t also take on building and managing a gym.
‘We’ve been hearing about it since we moved here [10 years ago],’ Helke said. ‘People go to the [YMCA], but it’s not a huge facility. Rock climbing got into the summer Olympics for 2020 so it’s a huge sport that’s growing and this is actually the only college town in the country that doesn’t have a public, commercial climbing gym.’
He also noted the popularity of outdoor climbing locally and the new climbing wall at Penn State’s IM Building.
About two years ago he reached out to Vertical Adventures, a long-time customer of Organic Climbing.
‘It’s a very nice partnership in that we know the local market, we make the gear, but they know how to manage and run the actual facilities,’ Helke said.
Roberts said his team made several trips to the area and found it would be a good fit.
‘It just made a lot of sense for who we are and what we stand for,’ Roberts said. ‘It’s just a cool market and being able to partner with a company like Organic is pretty awesome.’
Vertical Adventures’ three gyms in Columbus, Ohio, the first of which opened in 1994, have members ranging in age from 5 to 70, Roberts said. They also have a large adaptive climbing program and hosted the 2018 USA Climbing Adaptive National Championship.
Roberts said climbing makes for a popular family and social activity.
‘It’s a very unique family sport because it really lends itself to a family participating in it together,’ he said. ‘Even though my sons and one of my daughters are much better climbers than me or my wife, we can all go together to the gym. We can climb together. The way the routes are intermixed, we can be climbing side-by-side while doing things of radically different difficulty.’
He added that while it involves physical fitness, climbing is also about mental skills.
‘Rock climbing, whether indoor or outdoor, is really kinesthetic puzzle-solving,’ he said. ‘It’s doing puzzles with your body. It’s another way in which it really allows people of widely different skills, abilities and strengths to be able to enjoy it simultaneously together.’
See ClimbNittany on Instagram for more.
