Owners of the Climbing Collective gym in Longmont are hopeful they can reopen the facility later this week after high winds damaged roof panels last Friday, forcing a temporary closure.
If all goes to plan, replacement panels will be fabricated Tuesday by a firm in Boulder.
“Then we could open next weekend,” said one of the gym’s owners, Mack Maier. “But, that’s like best-case scenario. We understand that things very seldom go according to plan in construction, especially commercial construction.”
The Climbing Collective is one of Colorado’s foremost indoor climbing gyms. It opened in October 2023 with 25,000 square feet of climbing space and walls towering 60 feet in the air. Last February it hosted an ice climbing World Cup event on the premises outside, the first in the U.S. since 2019. It is set to host the event again this coming February.
“We’ll definitely have this fixed by then,” Maier said.
Maier said the velocity of the wind gust that took out the panels on the south-facing side of the roof was unknown, but at least two gusts in Boulder County exceeded 100 mph. The Longmont airport — six miles west of the gym — recorded a gust of 59 mph.
The owners were in for a shock that morning when they filed an insurance claim for repairs.
“We were told that in the state of Colorado, all of the insurers have faced so many payouts in the last five or so years for wind and hail claims that our $2,500 deductible applies to everything else but wind and hail events,” Maier said. “For wind and hail events, it’s 5% of the building’s value. In this case, that came to $311,836.”
The cost of repair is estimated to be somewhere around $120,000, but insurance won’t be paying a dime, so the owners started a GoFundMe. As of 2 p.m. Monday, it had raised just over $25,700 in pledges.
“We felt really weird doing it, but we put it at $120,000 because we think that is what this is going to cost,” Maier said. “Obviously the closer we get to that number, the better. We’re not using the money for anything else, other than to replace this danged roof. Just the crane alone, to get the roof panels off and put (new ones) on, that’s $15,000.”
Maier was in for another shock after news outlets reported the creation of the GoFundMe effort.
“We are getting lambasted all over the internet,” Maier said. “People think we’re starting a GoFundMe to fund our lavish lifestyles, even though I just bought my first house at age 40. I used to live in a van, starting new businesses. There are a few people standing up for us, saying, ‘Hey, this is a small business with three families behind it,’ but every other comment is full of vitriol, saying we’re rich people.
“You know how it is, the common zeitgeist in America is that if you’re successful and you have a business, then you’re the bad guy,” Maier added. “I don’t think these are bad people, they just have no idea what they’re talking about.”