Tucked away in a nondescript block of tan warehouses on the western edge of Santa Maria is a new business from the people behind SLO-Op climbing gym—The Pad. It’s a rock climbing gym with 10,000 square feet of space and 5,000 square feet of climbing wall, plus yoga, weightlifting, and the occasional climbing competition.
Dustin Wise, who manages The Pad, said they hoped to tap into a new community in Santa Maria.
“We wanted to reach out to a different community and expand into a different area,” he said. “It’s a different activity for Santa Maria. Having it here makes sense because they’re active-minded people. It’s a chance to go work out [and] meet people.”
The new gym, which opened on July 11, is dedicated to bouldering, where climbers clamber up shorter routes without ropes or harnesses.
“There’s no ropes here,” explained Wise. “Just crash pads.”
Bouldering as a sport is relatively new. One way to locate its origins is the sale of the first commercially available crash pad by Black Diamond. The crash pad is what makes bouldering, well, bouldering. It’s the most important piece of equipment: a thick, foamy slab to safely break one’s fall. With a crash pad, rock climbers can ditch their elaborate systems of belays, carabineers, and harnesses to scramble up shorter routes safely.
People have been clambering up rocks, of course, since homo sapiens descended from primates who lived and died by climbing. Big wall climber and writer John Middendorf traces the sport of modern rock climbing to the last part of the 19th century, when goatherders in the Alps discovered that herding Europeans to nearby rock faces to climb recreationally was far more lucrative.Â
Today, rock climbing in America has a firm toehold with the gym-going set. According to the Climbing Wall Association, there were between 400 and 600 climbing gyms in the United States as of 2011.Â
The Outdoor Industry Association, which lumps in climbing with sports such as whitewater kayaking and mountain biking, claims the industry of outdoor recreation is an economic titan, with 59 percent of Californians participating in outdoor recreation each year. Their numbers for the size of the industry are impressive: $85.4 billion in consumer spending nationally and 6.1 million American jobs are generated, the association says, through the various things we do to stay fit outside.Â
To get ready for those outdoor sports, one can elect to practice inside, at a place like The Pad. “It’s a training area where if you did want to climb on some ropes outdoors then you could get in shape in here and do it on your own,” Wise explained. “To be able to climb fun holds and boulder routes indoors is super fun. To be able to do some national parks and get outdoors—that’s fun too.”Â
The walls at The Pad are covered in strange, colorful holds for hands and feet. These pieces are modular and rearrangeable; they’re attached to the wall, not built into it, and are regularly reorganized into new routes by the gym’s dedicated route-setter.Â
“They come in here every two weeks, pull a certain section off, reset them, and it creates a whole new terrain and different rocks. That’s kind of the format,” Wise explained.
Beneath those modular routes, which are rated on a difficulty scale from V1 up, is a structure originally realized in cardboard. When this reporter visited The Pad, that miniature model was sitting in the main space of the gym—a dusty gray diorama on display among the tools and plans, with slanting miniature surfaces that mirrored the rock walls and colorful holds towering around them.Â
That cardboard model, Wise explained, was brought to engineers and architects who helped to realize a viable and structurally sound floorplan. After that, the steel guys came in.
“The steel guys spent six or seven days and built this: the steel section of a climbing wall,” Wise said. “Behind the wall, you can see the dense forest of steel struts that support the layers of t-nuts and plywood that form the basic structure of the wall.
Wise said that cutting and laying the plywood took a long time. “Some of it, because of its curved surface, required multiple layers,” he said. “We’ve been at it for a few months.”
Now the gym is open, with drop-in hours past 5 p.m. and a monthly membership that gives members access to both SLO-Op and The Pad.
Wise hopes that people will drop in and get those memberships, giving The Pad a grip in Santa Maria. The gym, he said, is an all-ages realization of something universal.Â
“We grow up wanting to climb trees. As kids, you’re always wanting to climb something. It’s not even an adult playground; it’s a playground for all ages,” he said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 16-23, 2015.
