Rock Walls Repel Some but Get Others Climbing
“I’ve been called a lot of dirty names for bringing climbing to the public,” Jeff Wilson told me.
His words were almost drowned out by the hammering, grinding and sanding sounds that echoed about the large steel shed where we were chatting. Boulder-sized panels and chunks of fiberglass, along with other plasticized materials, littered the concrete floor. They were molded and spray-painted to resemble, well, boulders. Ranks of steel trailers, each fitted with a simulated rock wall of up to 25 feet laid horizontally, filled the yard outside.
Wilson’s Newcastle, Calif.-based business, Extreme Engineering, claims to be the largest maker of mobile climbing walls in the country. That makes it one of those companies that dominates an industry that most people don’t know exists, unless they’ve recently visited a county fair or carnival where these rock faces-on-wheels are a common sight, often accessorized with clambering children.
By turning out about three climbing walls or other products a week, Extreme is set to pull in about $3 million in revenue this year, a rate that has doubled annually since 1999.
Characteristically, Wilson, 49, backed into the business.
The son of a Santa Cruz farmer, he acquired an engineering degree from Cal State Long Beach before joining Hughes Aircraft and, later, Hewlett-Packard Co.
Percolating as he does with the attitude of a compulsive inventor who believes that almost anything can be engineered -- given the right mental resources and an unforgiving deadline -- it’s not surprising that in 1996, while still an HP executive, he jury-rigged a climbing wall in his garage for his 10-year-old son. The apparatus was made out of a sheet of plywood and, for handholds, a few gobs of the auto-repair putty Bondo. In no time, it became a neighborhood sensation. “One thing led to another,” he says.
Soon he had reached a deal with a French distributor of outdoor equipment to market a version bolted to a steel trailer and fitted with a winch to tilt the wall upright. But when the distributor, who expected to sell to climbing enthusiasts, first saw the product on the opening day of a sporting goods trade show, he groused: “This is for children.”
The prototype was banished to a remote location in a parking lot. As it happened, that was the perfect spot to grab the attention of entrepreneurs scouring for attractions for fairgrounds and local carnivals. Wilson took five orders at $12,000 each. “That was my epiphany,” he recalls.
Around the same time, Wilson showed his mobile wall to Ross Butcher, whose Los Alamitos industrial-engineering company had hired Wilson to design some high-tech equipment as a freelance inventor. Sitting in Wilson’s yard, they discussed fluid level sensors for a spell and then, as Wilson describes the event, “Ross spent the rest of the day talking about climbing walls.”
Butcher swiftly spotted the marketing flaw in Wilson’s design: Every climber required a friend stationed on the ground with a belaying rope to assist in getting up the wall and back down.
“You need to get rid of the person on the rope,” Butcher advised.
That led to two developments. First, Wilson was goaded to invent an auto-belay, a cable-and-pulley device that, bolted to the top of the wall, takes up the climber’s slack on the way up and then safely reels him or her down. (He holds patents on the auto-belay and the mobile wall design.) Second, Butcher signed on as CEO of Wilson’s company.
One thing they discovered quickly -- and seem to rediscover every day -- is the difficulty of striking a balance in the outdoor equipment industry between the sports devotee market and the amusement business. Even after his parking-lot epiphany, Wilson kept emulating real-life Sierra rock walls in his design, complete with overhangs and challenging vertical crevices.
“But the average person couldn’t handle it,” Butcher says. When an amusement operator called one day to complain that one of his customers had gotten a foot wedged in the crevice and lost his sneaker, they promptly redesigned the wall to give people simulated rock conditions, without the peril.
“We had to find the right challenge level, and I had stepped over the boundary,” Wilson says.
A similar evolution can be seen in another Extreme product, its “Mobile Quad Pod.” This contraption suspends four customers at a time in harnesses, each fixed to a pair of flexible polymer rods and over-inflated pads, allowing them to bounce 20 or 25 feet in the air. Think of it as an upside-down bungee jump.
This summer, at the San Diego Zoo, where a concessionaire had installed the quad pod near the pandas and named it the “Jungle Jump,” Wilson and his 10-year-old daughter, Shelby, found kids lined up for three-minute rides at $7 a shot.
“I think the harnesses need to have tails on them,” Shelby remarked. Recognizing that the device’s sweet spot is kids aged 6 to 12, the company plans a new version, due to be rolled out at trade shows this fall, repainted in a jungle theme and renamed “Monkey Motion.”
“It’s really a kid’s ride,” Butcher says.
The company’s flagship is still a five-climber, 25-foot mobile wall, which it sells to amusement operators for $32,000. It’s designed to be set up or broken down in about 20 minutes without special equipment. Wilson believes that artificial rock-climbing is physical and interactive enough to escape the boom-and-bust cycle of other recreational fads, so he’s hoping for more growth ahead. If that means more dirty looks from the purists, so be it.
“So we’ve brought climbing from the purists to the public,” he says, “but purists come from somewhere, don’t they?”
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
