Challenger Board Authority

Challenger Board Authority is a board gym opening in downtown Chattanooga. It is not open yet. The only thing it publishes is an Instagram account, so this page is short on purpose - what follows is what a board gym is and what a third one would mean for climbing here, and it will be replaced with the real thing the day there is one to describe.

A board gym is built around adjustable training boards rather than routes on a wall. A Kilter, MoonBoard or Tension Board is a standardised grid of holds at an angle you can change, with problems set in an app by climbers all over the world. Because the layout is identical everywhere, a problem set in Colorado climbs the same in Chattanooga, and a board in one city is directly comparable with a board in another - which is the whole point, and the reason boards have taken over training.

That is a different proposition from a climbing gym. There is no route setting to speak of, usually no ropes, and little for a beginner: you turn up knowing what you want to work on. What you get is the most efficient hour of climbing available indoors, which is why board gyms tend to open in towns with serious rock nearby. There are few towns with more serious rock nearby than this one.

Chattanooga is not starting from nothing here. Synergy has a training room with a MoonBoard, a Kilter, an adjustable Tension board, a campus board and fingerboards, and Crux Conditioning on McCallie Avenue has a mirrored Tension Board 2 and a spray wall you can book by the session. A third, downtown, aimed squarely at boards, would give this city more board climbing per head than almost anywhere its size.