Happy Thanksgiving! Thankfully today is a day off of construction for our team and army of contractors who are making Alpine come to life. It’s been 114 days since breaking ground on August 4 (just over 3.5 months). Alpine has been designed from the ground up, down the the inch. So when you read that, what does that practically translate into? Well… for starters, hours upon hours of design calls with Walltopia, the worlds largest indoor climbing wall builder. Their designers are based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which is also where they manufacture 100% of the climbing walls, including Alpines. Bulgaria is in Eastern Europe (in case you were wondering) and also represents about a 9 hour time difference. To bridge the gap, the majority of our design calls were 90-120 minutes and began at 5:30am Pacific Standard Time.
When we began looking for land, our friends at Siegfried Engineering came through with a ton of support with diligence on the dirt, draft site plans, and ensuring overall we’d have a solid pad to build upon. When it came to the building itself, we knew we wanted to do a metal building. Both for aesthetics, overall costs and speed, prefab metal buildings are a cost effective way to stand up a building, a big building, fast. That said, we didn’t want the building to simply look like, well, a rectangle metal building. Standard metal warehouses are typically not the most interesting buildings to look at. We asked the guys at CBC Steel to get creative and their engineers came back with a great plan. This plan helps us give you the massive 16’x75′ window that views the upper lead wall and tall areas of the facility. To tie it all together, our architect, API and our General Contractor, DeGraff Development worked together to bring ultimately what you see when you’re driving along HWY 99 today.
Over the past 114 days a lot has happened with construction; dirt has been moved and leveled, trenches have been dug, concrete, a lot of concrete was poured, steel beams have gone into the ground, siding is about half way up, wood framing outlines the retail, lobby, locker rooms, yoga room, fitness areas, electrical conduit has been run, plumbing plumbed, HVAC duct is hanging from the ceiling, oh, and the frontage road in front of our project is underway! It’s been a busy 3.5 months.
All of our high resolution construction photos have been brought to you by our good friend, Paul Blackmon.
And while a lot of work is behind us, the real fun and work has already begun. Walltopia containers have made their way across the Atlantic Ocean and will be on site in the next couple weeks. The Bulgarian install crew is finishing up another gym on the east coast now and will arrive as soon as the containers do. When they do, they’ll spend the next two months stacking steel, putting it all together, attaching the panels and finally, installing the padding flooring throughout. Once they’re complete, we have a crew of guest setters from all over that will be helping us with our initial set. The initial set will include about 100 different tall climbing routes and 150 boulder problems. Yes, that’s 250 different climbs for you to work on, conquer, and have fun with…. until we take them all down and turn over the entire gym, which we’ll do 4-5 times a year.
Finishing construction work will begin on the rest of the details; locker room tiles, retail, front desk, gym flooring, yoga room vibes, outdoor deck, and quickly prepare so we can open as soon as we can! Things have gone smooth thus far and we’re hoping within another 3-4 months, we’ll be ready to welcome you all!
It goes without saying, but yes we are in the middle of a Global Pandemic. We’ve been grateful that this has not yet impacted our project schedule and are praying that by the time we’re open, the vaccine is distributed and the State of California is open. If not, we simply take it day at a time and will be prepared to open at whatever capacity County guidance provides us. There are 97 Indoor Climbing Centers across California that have been impacted this year. Their County location drastically changes the impacts. We’ve joined the California Indoor Climbing Coalition who is advocating for the industry and help present fact based data to State Leadership and show how our facilities are simply different and deserve their own category.
Lastly, we LOVE HEARING FROM YOU! Your psych motives us and drives us to put in 16-18 hour days, every day. Thanks for the DM’s, emails, comments, Likes, shares, gift card and swag purchases, and most of all, positive vibes and prayers for this place. Can’t wait for you to join us.
