For an outdoorsy youth growing up on Long Island, opportunities nearby for wilderness adventure are pretty much limited to surfing. So, that’s what Stephen Bittner did — until he got a job at an Eastern Mountain Sports shop in Carle Place and made friends with a co-worker who loved rock climbing and made regular jaunts to the Gunks. It changed his life, and now he wants to share his obsession with people in Kingston and beyond.
“I’ve been a climber since I was 19,” Bittner said as he gave HV1 a preview tour of Mustangs Bouldering, his enormous new climbing gym in the Kingston Plaza, still under construction in late November. “I was taking classes at Stony Brook two days a week so I could climb three days a week. I lived in my car on weekends.”
After college, Bittner started working for a group of climbing gyms called The Cliffs that began in Long Island City and Valhalla and became so popular that it expanded to Gowanus, Harlem and Philadelphia and was eventually acquired by Movement, “the largest gym company in the world.” He honed his skills and earned his guiding certification. He also met Ivan Vargas, a Miami native whom Bittner calls “an incredible route-setter.” They became friends, climbing partners and eventually business partners; Vargas is now doing all the route design for Mustangs.
It was during one of their frequent excursions to New Paltz to climb the “world-class” pitches of the Shawangunk Ridge that Vargas said, “I want to live up here.” “Steve took that quite literally,” he recounted. “And so, we started looking at spaces.” Vargas found a house in Gardiner within walking distance of a trail up to the Trapps. Bittner bought a house in High Falls and in 2015 went to work for Rock & Snow in New Paltz, as well as leading climbs for Mountain Skills Climbing Guides.
After five years of this, the friends felt ready to go into business for themselves. “My idea at first was to open a tiny gym, as close as I can to the cliffs,” Bittner said. But they soon realized that they wanted to create something on a larger scale than the small climbing gyms that exist in the area, to serve a growing subculture of people who are drawn to the mid-Hudson by their love for the sport. “I realized that if we want to build community, we have to be in Kingston.”
The feedback they got on their business plan from fellow climbers and Kingstonians in general was very encouraging. “People kept saying, ‘There’s nowhere to go in Kingston that’s not a bar. Kingston really needs something like this,’” Bittner reported. “This is the biggest city that’s close to the biggest climbing destination in the Northeast. To everyone, it seemed like a win.”
The search for the perfect space took some time, complicated by the COVID pandemic. “We got pretty far with the Hudson Valley Mall, and there were some other buildings for sale,” Bittner said. “We found this place off-market. Brad Jordan, the owner of this plaza and Herzog’s, called in January [2024] to say that he had a lease ending in February. Sav-On Party Central was moving out of its space. I was in France. I flew home and toured the place the day I got home.”
The space at 316 Plaza Road, tucked into the interior corner of the uptown mall between HealthQuest’s Outpatient Clinic and Plaza Pizza, turned out to be perfect for their needs, with 9,000 square feet of floor space and lofty ceilings. Bittner scrambled to raise money for the venture, selling his house, getting family members to buy equity in the business and taking loans from fellow members of the outdoor community. “I’ve invested every penny I’ve ever made, except enough to live on for eight months,” he said. They signed the lease in May, got the keys on June 1 and have been renovating ever since.
Besides surrounding the visitor with ever-changing climbing opportunities, plus free-weights and stretching equipment, Bittner and Vargas are working to transform the cavernous space into something cozy and welcoming. There will be a café, bar and lounge area, filled with upbeat music and “old, beautiful furniture. We want to make it warm, familiar and comfortable, with kind of a surf shack vibe,” Bittner said. The inspiration for the Mustangs brand was the belief that “The climbing industry has done a pretty poor job of making itself cool. My partner Lily came up with the name.”
A place that’s simply fun to hang out, but isn’t a bar, seems a worthy goal in itself. But access to top-notch climbing routes, even after dark, in the winter or in dangerous weather, is Mustangs Bouldering’s raison d’etre. And it’s here that Vargas’ particular talents come into play. He’s designing the routes to offer something intriguing for all skill levels, color-coded for steepness and difficulty, from a rank beginner’s boulder pitch to a terrifying ceiling overhang rated E15. He’ll be rerouting them every four to five weeks. “We’re always fighting the threat of boredom,” he said.
Vargas, who has more than 30,000 hours of climbing experience, looks like he’s doing geometry in his head as he moves the handholds and footholds around on the climbing wall, but Bittner described his “aesthetic” as “more intuitive than mathematical.” Vargas characterized the quality most critical to his line of work as “athletic empathy. You’re not setting for just yourself. You have to appeal to a wide audience: climbers of different body type, height, skillsets… You have to curate an environment for all these different kinds of climbers and make it challenging for them.”
In addition to the preset routes that ring the big room, Mustangs features a high-tech, freestanding “system board” that functions as a highly flexible learning tool for climbers. The holds light up with different patterns in response to prompts from an app. “It offers 10,000 different climbs,” Bittner explained.
This wonderland of healthy leisure activity is getting its finishing touches and promised to open “soon,” once the proprietors get final approval from the City of Kingston for their electrical and plumbing upgrades to the space. Hours are scheduled to be from noon to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. In the meantime, they’re offering tours of the work-in-progress on Wednesdays and Fridays from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., and signing up “founding members” at a discounted rate of $69 per month, $800 per year. To learn more, e-mail info@mustangsbouldering.com and sign up for updates, or visit www.mustangsbouldering.com or www.instagram.com/mustangsbouldering.
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