Climbing
Dry Creek
- I discovered the beautiful sport of rock climbing after I moved to Montrose, Colorado, a small town in the western half of the state (the lesser populated half), when my friends Dave Allen and Sean Smith took me out to Dry creek, shown to the right. This particular climb is called Brown Wall, rated 5.12 (I can't do it, yet). Dry creek is a nice little sport area with clean desert varnished sandstone walls about 40' tall. Though everything is bolted there (which is unfortunately necessary--the routes really aren't sufficiently protectable any other way) the bolts are not overdone. Most routes have four bolts, so that's 10' between them. Let's just say that I've come really close to peeing my pants on the second bolt sometimes. A camera is always the last thing on my mind when I go climbing, so none of the pictures on this page are of me or my friends. Unfortunately, I don't know who the pictures are of. If you know, please tell me.
Escalante and Unaweep Canyons
- These two canyons are located roughly half way between Montrose and Grand Junction, and offer some spectacular traditional climbing. Escalante (left) has the best sandstone cracks (or any kind of crack, for that matter) I have ever seen. The picture is a great example of the perfect fist cracks out there.
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Unaweep (right) is farther away, and doesn't have the quality of
Escalante, so I don't go there often. But as you can see from the
pic, it does have some nice long routes.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison
- The Black Canyon is undoubtedly what Montrose is most famous for. It has some wild adventure climbing. Basically everything I am doing now is just preparation for an ascent of this gigantic canyon. To the left is a picture of North Chasm View wall. It's freakin' huge. Those are trees at the bottom.