St. John’s newest bouldering gym and cafe, The Cove, wants you to ‘get stoked!’
Bouldering is rock climbing without ropes – but don’t worry, you don’t go as high, there are beginner-friendly routes, and the staff at The Cove will teach you how to fall safely.
Pioneered by longtime members of the climbing community in Newfoundland, co-owners Joel Harvie, Daniel Alacoque, Stephen Ryan and Bob Flynn have found great success since opening their doors in the summer of 2023.
Bouldering: both addictive and aerobic
Climbing seems to come to people entirely by chance, but once folks find it they’re absolutely hooked. Co-founder and operator Joel Harvie got a coupon for Walnuts – St. John’s only other climbing gym – on a bus back from a marble mountain trip in his early twenties, and after cashing in on it, “I was at Walnuts every day for a month until I had to take a rest day, climbing was just very, very addicting, I couldn’t help myself, I haven’t looked back since and now here we are.”
Co-founder and operator Daniel Alacoque also found climbing around a similar age. After his friend pawned off their old climbing shoes on to him, Alacoque tried it out of curiosity and found himself quickly addicted to climbing as well.
The Cove came to be when Harvie and Alacoque were both working at Walnuts. Heavily immersed in the local rock–climbing community, they identified a want for more in St. John’s, as they had both “done a fair bit of travel and had seen what climbing could be outside of Newfoundland.”
“We were both working on this idea of a bouldering gym separately and we somehow figured each other out, sat down once for a conversation over a beer at Big Ben’s and I don’t think we ever turned around and thought about doing it without each other after that,” Harvie says, “we wanted to give back to the community who gave us so much.” Their visions for what a bouldering gym in St. John’s might look like seemed to align perfectly, and they began seriously working on the idea.
Cardio and community at the ‘church‘
Since its grand opening, The Cove has seen an overwhelmingly positive response from patrons, achieving one of the co–founder’s main goals in its establishment: to grow the local climbing community. Joel Harvie recalled that at the beginning, their friends and existing members of the local climbing community were thrilled. Now, over half their client base is people who didn’t climb before The Cove, and people seem to love the place.
Alacoque likened being immersed in the climbing community to church, saying that “from what we know growing up, the climbing community is a little bit like a church sometimes, you spend years in the community – you see people meet each other, get married, have kids, and they’re all continuously climbing whether it’s casually climbing in the same day or hanging out at community events and its really cool to see.”
“Seeing the youth come up in our ‘church,’ in our community, and so many of them continuing to stay involved after their default programming as a youth athlete … watching them still hang around and integrate into the community of their own volition has been really cool,” Harvie added.
As far as fitness goes, bouldering especially has a low barrier to entry. Harvie cites the accessibility factor as one of the main reasons for its spike in popularity over the last decade, “for bouldering you don’t need to do any kind of rope safety lesson which makes it more accessible to just try it out… if you imagine trying to organize every one of your workouts around somebody else, that’s brutal, so bouldering lets you just come in and do it on your own.”
Climbing also has a sense of childlike whimsy about it – many St. John’s residents may recall attending a birthday party at Walnuts as a child – which makes it a great outlet for stress relief, all while staying active. “Climbing also is a very natural thing to do, you grow up climbing trees, and stop as an adult, you don’t have that sort of childlike movement and it’s very cathartic to use your four limbs to climb up a wall,” Alacoque says.
Continued success of climbing on the rock
In conversation with The Muse, Alacoque also spoke about his experience as one of the leading climbing coaches in the province. Climbing is a highly individualized sport, and he said it’s been extremely rewarding to work with individual climbers and see their progress.
“Climbing is a good sport to coach the person rather than the team. If you coach a team of soccer, you’re focusing on the team, maybe some drills. You’re rarely challenging people and athletes one one-on-one, or encouraging the athlete to push their own limits individually. With climbing, all of the athletes, whether they’re youths or adults, they’re very individually focused. So if you are a person that is motivated to improve, climbing is a really good sport to push yourself,” says Daniel Alacoque.
The Cove recently announced plans for expansion following their immense success. The future of climbing in Newfoundland looks bright, and any susceptible climbers are encouraged to try it out, especially as the season’s weather worsens and staying active gets more difficult.