A story about finding the story for an article about the grand opening of a new climbing gym in Honolulu published by Climbing magazine in August 2021.
People who know me know I don’t hang around the gym much. Sure, I was there in 1987 when Vertical Club, America’s first climbing gym, opened for business in Seattle, and I’ve visited gyms here and there over the ensuing 30-plus years (in six states and two foreign countries so far), but to be honest I’ve never become a big fan. The Seattle area has a surfeit of outdoor climbing walls and boulders that, despite the rain, dried off enough a couple of days a week to get in a bouldering session. If the sun came out, I could be at Schurman Rock in ten minutes instead of driving 30 to 45 minutes in bad traffic to get to a gym. And as my friend Russ Erickson said, “Why pay to climb in a gym when you can climb outside for free?”
Then I moved to Oahu, and although there’s some good free, outdoor bouldering and climbing on the island, it’s not very close to home. Getting up to Waimea for a bouldering session requires getting up early for an hour’s drive if you want to beat tourist traffic and get a parking spot, and unlike Seattle, there are no outdoor climbing walls. I have my indoor training wall set up in my condo—a squat rack tricked out with a hang board and plywood panels with bolt-on holds and a simulated crack—but it gets boring cranking sets on the same plastic holds day after day. So boring that I started looking for a climbing gym.
Luckily for me, HiClimb Rock Climbing Gym was opening within walking distance of my home. Its Grand Entrance, as they were calling it, was scheduled for July 1, 2021. Thinking it might be fun to attend the opening, I contacted Climbing magazine to see if they were interested in an article about it. “Maybe,” they replied. “What’s the angle?”
To be honest, I didn’t know what the angle was. New climbing gyms open all the time. It’s no big deal, not worthy of reporting in a national magazine without a unique angle. And Climbing magazine had recently run an article about Kānaka Climbers, a Hawaiian Native-led nonprofit formed to encourage ethical outdoor recreation in the state. It was going to be a hard sell. I admitted I didn’t know the angle yet, but would investigate and find one.
I contacted HiClimb and connected with Anthony Bagnoli, the gym’s general manager, who invited me on a tour. The space, a large, open cinder-block warehouse with a peaked corrugated-tin roof, reminded me of the original Vertical Club space (an old bottling plant where they had glued rocks the walls), but HiClimb’s facility a modern design, with 14,000 square feet of textured, modular plywood climbing walls sprinkled with brightly colored holds and volumes. Nice, but not really a good angle. What about the challenge of opening a new gym in the middle of a pandemic?
They had a good story: In 2019, Devin Tryan, a local real estate agent (described by one of his clients as a "nice, young haole boy") decided to open a climbing gym in Honolulu. He found the perfect location, a cinder-block warehouse next to a parking garage on Ilaniwai Street in the Kaka’ako neighborhood, an industrial district tucked in between Waikiki beach and the Downtown business core. He signed the lease in January 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. His lender balked, withdrew the loan, and left him stranded. Enter Steven Dauck, an Air Force explosive ordinance disposal tech with an MBA from the University of Arizona, who partnered with Tryan and, along with other investors, provided the cash infusion and motivation needed go forward, even though it was uncertain when, or if, the gym could actually open, given Hawaii’s draconian shutdown rules that still mandated mask-wearing and limited the number of people who could gather after every other state had fully reopened. Was that an angle? Hard to say. But there was more.
“Our building stands on the grounds of Hawaiian fish ponds which were turned into salt plates to harvest salt,” Bagnoli told me. “The ancient Hawaiian settlements were followed by plantation worker homes and ‘athletic clubs’—boxing clubs divided along the ethic lines of the immigrants of Hawaii: Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and others, before the area was turned into an industrial wasteland of warehouses.” And, he told me, the polemics of climbing on sacred lands was very much a consideration in opening a climbing gym in Hawaii. The Grand Entrance, he told me, would honor the cultural and spiritual aspects of opening a climbing gym on sacred lands with a traditional Hawaiian blessing followed by a hula, taiko drummers, and Chinese dragon dancers. Bingo!
Bagnolli invited me to attend the Grand Entrance, which was a treat, with Kahu BrutusLa Benz blowing his conch shell in the four directions of the wind then delivering a mele oli (a chant delivered without musical accompaniment) followed by a speech acknowledging the sacred nature of the ʻāina before blessing the walls and space with salt and sea water infused with water gathered from Waiau, a lake near the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in Hawaii. After the blessing, Kumu Hula Kanoe Williams, a member of HiClimb, danced a modern hula accompanied by the soothing sounds of ‘ukulele, upright bass, and slack key guitar, instruments brought to Hawaii during the plantation period, representative of the cultural diversity of the Hawaiian Islands. Then it got noisy. First came the taiko drummers, a group of Japanese-Americans representing a centuries-old tradition that was established in Hawaii as early as 1910, followed by a troupe of Chinese Lion Dancers whose raucous drum, gong, and cymbal pounding promised to bless the space and rid it of evil spirits and bad feng shui. I have to admit, it was a lot more entertaining than the grand opening of the Vertical Club in 1987 where all they had was a keg of beer.
Will I climb at HiClimb? Of course. Will I like it? I’m not sure. Like is a pretty strong word for me to use to describe climbing in a climbing gym. I’d still rather climb outdoors for free, but I’m sure I won’t hate it.
You can read my article about the Grand Entrance here: