A little over a year ago, Toledo had no climbing gyms open to the public. Soon it will have two.
Climb Toledo opened in a former barbershop in early 2021 with numerous bouldering routes mounted on plywood walls constructed at various challenging angles. Bouldering is performed on shorter rock formations with thick pads underneath instead of ropes and harnesses.
And late this year a much larger gym called Adventus Climbing plans to open on a property just south of Wildwood Preserve Metropark, near the University Parks Trail. It will feature both bouldering routes and taller walls that require safety equipment, its co-founders said.
Climb Toledo owner Alexander Horton said he has no doubt the city — despite few outdoor climbing spots nearby — can support two rock gyms. About 1,000 visitors, a majority of them first-time climbers, came through the gym in its first year, he said.
"I would consider 100 percent of mildly able-bodied people to be potential climbers," Mr. Horton, 25, said in an interview last week. "There's a couple hundred thousand in the city of Toledo that could absolutely fill a climbing gym, and I have no doubt that they will. I think when Adventus opens it's going to be insane, I think they're going to be packed."
Climb Toledo
Mr. Horton found rock climbing after he graduated from high school in Toledo and moved back to his native Oklahoma. He left Toledo to get sober and try to reconnect with Christianity, he said, after falling into alcohol and drugs in high school.
Soon he was working long hours at two jobs in the Tulsa area and filling any free time he had rock climbing.
"You can't really do anything stupid if you don't have time to," he figured, and he realized climbing was helping him grow physically, mentally, and spiritually.
But when he returned to Toledo about five years ago, Mr. Horton said he fell into a rut. There was nowhere to climb nearby; the closest gym was in Ann Arbor. So eventually he erected a small section of wooden climbing wall for training in the vacant barbershop below his apartment, which happened to be owned by his brother's organization, True North Ministries.
"One day the guy I was living with, Josiah, probably got tired of me complaining about having no way to climb," Mr. Horton recalled. "And he's a programmer. And he's like, 'Dude, I've bought the domain climbtoledo.com. So you have a website, now you need a gym.'"
With his brother's blessing, Mr. Horton began transforming the rest of the barbershop — plowing any extra money he made from his day job with Chick-fil-A into supplies. He was ready to open by summer 2020, but with the pandemic it didn't make sense.
So he waited until January 2021 — and quickly found there was pent-up demand.
About 75 percent of visitors in the first six months were first-time climbers, he said, and most of them came back multiple times.
"That was our evidence we can stick it out," he said. "People were coming, getting a glimpse of what climbing was. And people were coming back. They were liking it."
Now, Climb Toledo has three part-time employees and opens four days a week, with plans to add a fifth soon.
Adventus Climbing
Adventus co-founders Rachel Hobson and Jamie Monagan plan to open off North Reynolds Road in late 2022. The couple has secured a number of investors, and has a leadership team in place, including a climbing operations manager.
Ms. Hobson, a relationship coach, said she heard a talk by Dave Zenk, the Metroparks executive director, several years ago about how there was vast potential in Toledo to grow participation in several outdoor pursuits — including climbing.
“I came home and was like, 'This is a really good idea, and there’s a market here for it,'" Ms. Hobson said of a climbing gym.
So Ms. Hobson and Mr. Monagan started telling people about their idea and soon had several partners signed up. They plan to break ground on the 12,000-square-foot building this spring, and are ordering custom climbing walls from Walltopia, a Bulgarian company.
“We basically saw the need to serve the people who love the trails, adventures, people who were using the Metroparks," Ms. Hobson said.
The gym intends to support climbing teams and hold competitions. Mr. Monagan, a financial adviser with Savage and Associates, said he hopes it also provides a nice place to escape for young people, including high school students who have endured two years of the pandemic.
"We’re hoping this [gym opens] at the tail end of that, so they have a space to experience community, and engage in meaningful play that helps their development," he said.
First Published January 23, 2022, 12:00 p.m.
