Rocky Mountain Climbing Centre
The Rocky Mountain Climbing Centre ( rmcc) is the newest and biggest climbing gym to open in Canada in the past few years. You can’t miss it when driving just west of downtown Calgary past the giant 1988 Olympic ski jumps, its outdoor wall screams to be climbed.
The Calgary Climbing Centre ( ccc), with president Walson Tai, already had three locations throughout the city of Calgary: The Hanger, Stronghold and ccc Chinook. This is the fourth climbing gym opened by the ccc, and fifth in Calgary after Bolder Climbing Community. With walls reaching nearly 30 metres, the 25,000- square-foot facility is unlike any other in Alberta.
Located just west of Canada Olympic Park on West Valley Road, the amazing new Olympic-calibre facility is set to become the training grounds for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, where climbing has officially been added to the list of summer Olympic sports. This project has been nearly a decade in the making and wrapped up in spring 2018. The anticipation around the project has been building for everyone from the Olympic-level athlete to the weekend climbing enthusiast.
This cutting-edge facility has something for everyone with even the slightest interest in climbing. The rmcc location has bouldering, lead climbing, speed climbing, a climb park, system walls, a pro-shop, a Moon wall and a unique outdoor climbing wall on the side of the building. It is only the second climbing gym in Canada to have an outdoor climbing wall, following Allez Up in Montreal.
Even for non-climbers, it is hard not to be in awe of the amazing building. From the outdoor wall which faces a summer sunset over the Canadian Rockies to the many walls, pillars and boulders, the architecture is absolutely breathtaking. With one in 10 Calgarians having already been exposed to climbing, adding a new facility of this stature is likely to help the sport grow even more.
“The intention of it is to host a training ground for the Olympics in 2020 in Tokyo,” said Tai. “So a lot of that has been taken into consideration with the design of the building.”
While it’s more common to travel somewhere to experience the outdoor rock climbing, the rmcc might have you booking a f light to Calgary to clip bolts in a cool summer breeze while catching a tan on the outdoor wall.—