Odyssey Climbing
Appleton, Wisconsin
Specs: On September 9th, Odyssey Climbing opened its second mixed-discipline climbing gym in Wisconsin. The new gym is in Appleton, located about half an hour Southwest of its Green Bay location. Founded by Ben Ganther and Sam Howard, Odyssey opened its first facility in February 2023, after the idea of starting a gym emerged in 2019. While living in Milwaukee, Ganther would travel up to the Green Bay – Appleton area to visit family, “and we would bring our climbing stuff with us because we assumed there’d be a climbing gym somewhere between Green Bay and Oshkosh,” Ganther explained. “When there wasn’t a climbing gym somewhere in northeast Wisconsin, we were like, ‘Well, what the heck? There should be.’” They then started trying in earnest to develop Odyssey in the summer of 2019. After opening about three and a half years later, the “Green Bay gym stabilized pretty quickly, so it put us in a position to be able to grow in pretty short order,” Ganther said, adding, “It was always part of our strategic plan to have a location in both Green Bay and Appleton.”
Despite being only 30 minutes apart, Ganther said Green Bay and Appleton function as distinct markets. “There’s definitely an ‘I live in Green Bay, I do things in Green Bay’ and ‘I live in Appleton, I do things in Appleton’ mentality,” he described. “The two markets can support gyms independently of each other.” Additionally, Vertical Stronghold, previously Appleton’s sole climbing gym, operated in the city for over twenty years and ultimately closed in 2006, resulting in many climbers coming “out of the woodwork,” Ganther said. “They weren’t interested in driving 30 minutes to a climbing gym, but they will drive 10 minutes.” The new Odyssey gym was a ground-up build, located off Highway 41 and Highway 47 in Grand Chute, which Ganther hopes will improve access to climbing in the area. In proximity to Fox Valley Technical College, the gym’s accessibility was a large factor in the team’s location choice, but Ganther said, “the main reason we chose the site is it was available, and the seller was willing to work with us.”
The Appleton gym is a 14,000-square-foot building with 12,400 square feet of climbing wall surface, including a Kilter Board, over 60 roped belay bars, and 50% more bouldering than the Green Bay gym. Additionally, the gym has a 3,000-square-foot mezzanine, resulting in a space that is 6,000 square feet larger than the Green Bay gym. Within the facility there are free weight and cardio options, hangboards and a training board, in addition to several yoga classes. The gym also has a community lounge space and an outdoor recreation space. In designing the gym, the Odyssey team applied lessons from their first gym build and prioritized the flow and usability of the space, opting for a more open and square layout. The front desk placement was designed differently, for example, to avoid congestion and perceived busyness, because “The front desk in Green Bay becomes a pinch point where it feels busy before you even get in,” Ganther said. “The terrain feels totally different in Appleton than in Green Bay…In Green Bay, the facility is long and skinny… Appleton is much more open.”
Walls: Walltopia
Flooring: ClimbMat
CRM Software: Rock Gym Pro
Website: www.odysseyclimbing.com/appleton
Instagram: @Odyssey.Climbing
In Their Words: “Have a strategic or valuable reason for why you want to expand. Don’t just expand to expand, because it’s hard. You can do a lot of other things with the capital that would go into an expansion gym. So, making sure you’ve got a good reason to do it is probably my biggest piece of advice. And we’re super lucky with the partners that we’ve worked with at both locations. So, working with good people to help make that process as easy as possible, that’s helped us out a lot too.” – Ben Ganther, Odyssey Co-Founder
