The BLOC Climbing + Fitness

Tucson, AZ

Located in Tucson, Arizona, the BLOC is a 20,000 square-foot climbing and fitness center, featuring 7,000 square feet of flowing, curved, custom-stained bouldering walls and an intimidatingly deep cave. A sister gym to the nearby Rocks and Ropes, the BLOC offers a wide range of cardio and weight equipment, yoga and Pilates classes, autobelays, and treadwalls.

This image says a lot about what to expect out of your indoor climbing experience at The BLOC. Gorgeous, flowing and smooth walls that have various features for climbers to explore of varying experience levels. A well-run, well-organized clean space with a heavy focus on social integration with the climbing community.

It’s hard to believe but these ARC climbing walls were built a while ago, but you would never know it by looking at them. The hardwood birch surface panels age extremely well and can come with optional coatings that allow them to be buffed by your route-setters easily during every re-set, even without losing texture for climbers to smear on during a tough move.

This indoor climbing gym is much bigger than pictures make it seem. This view shows how airy and open it was built to be, for indoor rock climbing, socializing and hosting events.

A wide angle view of the indoor bouldering walls built by Vertical Solutions. This climbing gym hosts comps as a way to increase their community outreach and give their customers a fun event to show off their skills.

Another wide angle view of the climbing gym during a comp. But in this view, you can start to see where the fitness aspect of their business model come into play, with a large yoga studio and free weights/cardio area on the left hand side of the image, on the second floor.

The indoor climbing walls were designed and built by Vertical Solutions, and features this really unique climbing boulder island that morphs into a steep cave around back. The owners wanted to go with a custom graphics scheme that used our abilities to produce the perfect color stain and paint to accentuate the climbing wall features.

An overview of the ARC climbing walls, and how uniform and organic they look in person while still having visual separations and transitions for varying indoor climbing terrain.

From this side of the bouldering area you can get a good grasp on how far out this boulder island is and the massive size of the bouldering cave that the climbing walls create.

Seen here is part of the bouldering wall design the indoor climbing gym which blends an island and main bouldering wall to create a vast bouldering cave for their climbers.

This is a more detailed shot just outside one entrance to the bouldering cave. Climbing wall features like this are a great idea to build using ARC wall construction and manufacturing, to create a much more natural look and feel while climbing.

This image shows the opposite bouldering cave entrance as the previous image, and you can start to see how great of a finished product you can have when using the ARC climbing wall construction for surface joints that meet perfectly for a smooth transition.

Creating bouldering caves with Vertical Solutions highly aesthetic curved ARC walls not only looks more visually interesting than its geometric counterpart, but also provides more opportunity for challenging moves for climbers. The climbing walls we built for the owners of The BLOC is a great example of this.

Another detailed view of the of how smoothly Vertical Solutions likes to join the surfaces of our climbing walls together. This indoor bouldering cave was absolutely imperative to get right as it was going to be a main climbing wall feature and the focus of the climbing gym.

Not pictured in most other images, was the beginners indoor rope climbing area just to the left of the main bouldering climbing walls. Auto-belays are set up to introduce newcomers to climbing with ropes, and if interested further, they have the opportunity to visit the sister facility down the road that is a fully purpose-built indoor rope-climbing gym.

Curved ARC climbing walls like the ones seen here, provide a more aesthetic alternative to geometric wall designs, while still maintaining all of the functionality for setting with volumes and challenging routes that keep your gym fresh.

A view that shows how the finished climbing walls from Vertical Solutions looks in real life, with curves that can easily be done in 2D or 3D, like this bouldering island here.

This is a good up-close image of how custom color can add to your climbing wall design, either with paint, or with stain as seen here which keeps much of the original birch hardwood grain visible.

A more in-depth shot illustrating how smooth and seamless ARC climbing wall construction can be. Vertical Solutions climbing wall designers work with you to maximize the effectiveness of your floor plan, without overcrowding your walls and introducing unnecessary, over-complex, and costly features.

This indoor climbing gym was one of Vertical Solutions early examples of our ARC design and build efforts. The capabilities to make any shape you desire, smooth or tessellated has always been in advantage, which most of our competition can not reproduce.

While in the yoga studio and fitness areas, you can overlook all of the indoor climbing taking place below you on the ground floor. This helps instill that feeling of community throughout the facility.

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This image says a lot about what to expect out of your indoor climbing experience at The BLOC. Gorgeous, flowing and smooth walls that have various features for climbers to explore of varying experience levels. A well-run, well-organized clean space with a heavy focus on social integration with the climbing community.