An elaborate climbing gym is being planned for the long-vacant former The Register-Guard printing press building on Chad Drive in Eugene.

The gym would include a first for Lane County’s climbers: an outdoor climbing wall on the exterior of the four-story former press building, preliminary plans submitted to the city show.

Old-timers know that as the same wall where an illuminated Santa Claus was hung every winter holiday season when the RG newspaper occupied the building. Currently, SentinelOne, a tenant in the former newspaper offices, has its sign on the wall.

The new gym is being planned by Michael Hudson, owner of Elevation Bouldering Gym on Lincoln Street and Third Avenue on the eastern edge of the Whiteaker neighborhood.

Hudson says many details need to be ironed out.. “This has been many years in the making, and it’s still coming together,” he tells Eugene Weekly. Hudson expects the city to issue a conditional use permit for design specifics by late summer. But he has already alerted Elevation members to his plans, and public documents provide the basics.

The gym would be substantial. Aside from the exterior climbing wall, it would feature 22,000 square feet of interior climbing space in a two-story warehouse and the four-story former printing press structure, the plans show.

Around the country, newspaper building owners have cast about for new uses for facilities left empty by the swing toward digital news. Solutions range from apartments to pickleball courts.

Stop the presses!

 At The Register-Guard site, the printing press building for two decades housed a top-of-the-line Mitsubishi printing press, until after the paper’s owners, the local Baker family, sold the business and the press machinery to news conglomerate GateHouse Media, which shut the presses in 2021 and moved printing out of state. The presses were then sold for scrap metal. That left the cavernous building where Elevation tentatively plans interior climbing walls.

Hudson’s planning consultants are confirming with the city that a climbing gym is allowed under the broad “campus employment” zoning along Chad Drive. The zoning already allows uses as diverse as a basketball academy and a religious school.

In a message to members at his Lincoln Street gym, Hudson says he was spurred in part by the arrival of The Circuit, which last year opened a bouldering gym on East 11th Avenue in downtown Eugene.

“We have investigated many different options in the last seven years, and were very close to expanding near our current (Lincoln) space when The Circuit announced their intentions to build in Eugene,” his message says. “We redirected our focus to another more challenging location (the Chad property) that we’d previously dismissed as too difficult to build in. Over the course of the last year, we’ve been overcoming the obstacles inherent to this site, and now believe we can build the kind of climbing facility we’ve been dreaming of and Eugene has been waiting for.”

Varied venues

Local climbing venues include Elevation; Crux on West 3rd Avenue; The Circuit; climbing walls at the University of Oregon and at Willamalane’s Bob Keefer Center; and outdoor rope climbing on the columns at Skinner Butte.

Hudson’s Chad Drive gym would have rope climbing (in which the climber, secured by a rope held by a belayer, scales vertical walls), and bouldering (with no ropes, on lower, boulder-shaped structures).

Hudson would lease the space from the Baker family, which kept ownership of the 3500 Chad Drive complex after selling the business component of The Register-Guard newspaper to GateHouse in 2018. The family has leased out the office space to tenants such as SentinelOne. But the Bakers struggled to find takers for the tall press building. The family did not return messages from the Weekly.

Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.