New centre will have you climbing the walls
There is an activity that allows you to have fun exercising your entire body while literally ascending to unprecedented heights of achievement, and Regina now has a home for it. The Regina Climbing Centre is a new facility on Solomon Crescent that allows prairie dwellers to experience the joys of rock climbing in a safe, indoor environment.
“You can come into the gym, spend an hour and a half playing, not even realize that you had a workout, accomplish something that you maybe didn’t think you could do when you walked in, and walk out feeling pretty good about yourself,” said Jordan Mackay, owner/operator of Regina Climbing Centre. “It’s a tremendous core workout, it’s a tremendous leg workout, arm workout, and cardio workout.”
Each climber can adjust the level of difficulty appropriately, and the sport can be particularly well-suited for children. “We have a lot of children’s programming on Saturday and Sunday mornings,” said Mackay. “We’re teaching an awful lot of kids that have never rock-climbed before the basics of rock-climbing. It’s also a way that parents that may not want to rockclimb can actually have their children supervised in this facility.”
Because Regina has gone without a dedicated climbing facility for so long, Mackay designed his walls to engage beginner to intermediate climbers. “If you lived in Saskatoon, you’ve had the opportunity to climb at a high level for a very long time, because they’ve had a great gym there,” he said. “If you are an experienced climber, we do have some routes for those people, but we’re really looking to accommodate families and new climbers.”
Mackay hopes that introducing the sport to new climbers will give them a pastime that they can pursue for as long as they can lace up their climbing shoes. “It’s something that you can do for your entire life – it’s low-impact and very healthy,” he said, adding that the equipment and facility are designed to make climbing both exciting and safe. “We’re teaching people the methods and the proper way that they can learn to climb and then go outside and do it safely.”
Indeed, it was after a career in insurance and risk management that Mackay decided to return to his childhood passion. “I grew up in Calgary and did a lot of mountaineering when I was in Calgary,” he said. “I moved to Regina 18 years ago, and there wasn’t a climbing centre here. Climbing is an Olympic sport in 2020, and every other city seemed to have one, or two or more climbing centres. I really enjoyed doing it when I was a kid, so I decided that I would open one here.”
The facility opened its doors to the public on Jan. 19 after a design and construction process that enlisted Canadian talent and resources. “All of the lumber was Canadian, and it was important that we shop local,” said Mackay. “It was a British Columbia firm that engineered and built the gym.”
Now, the Regina Climbing Centre features a variety of challenges and accommodates different climbing styles. “We have roped climbing, we’ve got lead climbing, we’ve got auto-belays,” said Mackay. “There’s 6,200 square feet of rock climbing, so you have lots of space … We have a number of different walls. We have 22 rope stations and over 120 linear feet of bouldering, so there’s lots of climbing.”
For its one-year anniversary on January 19, the centre will host a bouldering event, which involves climbing without ropes over a foam mat. “We are going to be having a competition that will have 30 ‘problems,’” said Mackay. “In bouldering, a problem is really a route that you have to figure out how to get up with your body, and contort, and pull, and push and do all kinds of cool things with your body to get up it. There will be between 50 and 100 people that enter the competition, and it should be fun.”