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New climbing gym has room to grow Triangle Rock Club has 100 routes, free wireless The Chapel Hill News Jan 02, 2008 Joe Miller, Staff Writer Andrew Kratz has good news for anyone who has been to his new Triangle Rock Club climbing gym in the three weeks since it opened: The gym has room to expand. Since opening Dec. 7, the Morrisville indoor climbing gym has been climbing with climbers. On the Thursday evening after the opening, I counted more than 50 people exploring the gym's 9,000 square feet of climbing surface. That was about 7 p.m. By 8, the number had swelled by perhaps a third. Kratz, who is 37, and climbing partner Luis Jauregui, 35, thought a fourth climbing facility in the region would be welcomed when they conceived the idea for TRC a couple of years ago. At the time, Kratz was running the adventure program at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia. He was passing through the Triangle and stopped to climb at one of the existing indoor climbing gyms. He found the experience lacking. At the time, he and Jauregui, who had met in the U.S. Marine Corps, were looking to do something with their shared obsession. "We like the climbing community," Kratz says. "We were trying to figure out how to make our jobs our passion." The two did a little research and discovered that the Triangle has a strong climbing community and could definitely support another gym. But not just any gym, and the Triangle Rock Club is not just any gym. That 9,000 square feet of climbing surface, for instance, consists of plywood on a steel frame coated with a type of hand-troweled concrete that offers friction grip, in addition to the hundreds of holds bolted in. There's a substantial caving area (with a 14-foot boulder) and some 100 routes set on the walls, which also include three cracks, a chimney and several guidable routes. It has a lounge, big screen TVs, locker rooms and a conference room and will soon have a workout facility and retail outlet. If the ambience of climbing helps you work, it offers free wireless as well. But it's the climbing that's the main draw, and initial reactions from local climbers are positive. "It's plenty challenging," says John Provotero, who has been climbing for nearly 30 years. "Even after the novelty of these first routes wears thin, the layout of their gym is well suited for setting good routes of all grades, as well as the bouldering." Those routes, all 100 of them, were set by 15 climbers from around the country who gathered in November to designate challenging paths for climbers to reach the top. Eventually, local climbers will set the routes. Though the gym opened its doors earlier this month, its official grand opening will be in March. Perhaps by then the owners will be ready to break ground on that expansion.