Rifle- Fall Pressure

Fall is here! Along with colder temps, amazing colors, and shorter day, there's also a certain amount of tension and stress to finish up projects before the walls start seeping, and the weather turns bad.
Not everyone feels the pressure. There has been a lot of talent in the canyon lately. Here are some pictures of Dave Graham working The 7PM TV Show- 14a.
Although he has been ripping through most of the testpeices at Rifle, this one seems to be giving him a bit more trouble. It should be interesting to see his comments on this route when he sends it.
On to a subject that really annoys me- PARKING!!!
There is a serious lack of parking in Rifle, and it doesn't help when people inconsiderately park like this...
Obviously, not everybody cares...
but if everyone did their part, we could maximize the parking, and represent the climbing community as a responsible user group in the park. Remember, we are guests, climbing in Rifle is a privilege, and your actions affect everyone.

To lighten things up, here are some pictures of a really cool water spout, located to the left of the Bauhaus Wall.
There's actually a route just to the right of this water spout. In the picture above, you can see a couple of bolts to the right of the spout. The route seems to be fully equipped, with the exception of two bolts at the start. Lee theorizes that the equippers accidentally drilled into a water pocket in the limestone, releasing the water trapped behind the rock. After this, she thinks they abandoned the route. Who knows...
Here's a close up of the hole. Is this a manufactured spout or not? Ethical debates about the future of water spouts are sure to arise.

Mahabone

I finally managed to get the video of Rob Guinn sending Mahabone V6 at Mt. Evans, Area B. Enjoy.


Mahabone V6

Blast From the Past- Hueco 2004

Here are some pictures I found from my month long trip to Hueco in 2004. The pictures were taken By Jackie Hueftle.
Crazy East Spur Maze formation.
Hueco Ranger's Station
Let's go climbing!!! I think this is Tschil.

Here's some rare documentation that I can actually climb. My ascent of Full Service V10, in sweat pants!!!
In an attempt to be less narcissistic, here's a couple of shots of other people...
Julie- our guide for East Mountain that day.
Leif- Crazy German Guy #1
Crazy Geman Guy #1 on Full Sevice V10.
Can't remember his name. Crazy German Guy #2
Jackie Hueftle
Seth Allred on Full Service V10.

Rifle Cleanup

After a Summer of bouldering, it's time to switch gears. That's right, it's Rifle season! What an amazing climbing area. It's hard to express how lucky we are to have access to the area or how fun, beautiful, and awesome this place is. To make up for our lack of words and demonstrate our appreciation, the climbers organize an annual Rifle Cleanup. For one day every year, climbers pick up trash, and tackle a couple of improvement project. Then after a hard day of picking up trash, we have an after party. This year, the event took place on Sept. 5th. Here are this years Rifle Cleanup accomplishments:

-A terrace was built between Simply Read and Sometimes Always at the Project Wall to eliminate future erosion and make it safer to walk at the base of the wall.

-Two more parking spots were added at the Project wall.

-Two new parking spots were added at the Ruckman Cave.

-A suggested donation of $5 was collected to go towards rebolting efforts in Rifle.

The after party was great, except I didn't win anything in the raffle. Lots of food, Avery Beer, stickers, posters, and free gear. A huge thanks to all the Sponsors- Rock and Ice, La Sportiva, Avery Beer, Black Diamond, Prana, etc for supporting the event . Thankfully, I left before two dudes got up on a table, took their shirts off and started dancing with each other.

The Unbearable Camping Situation

Let me start by saying there is something very creepy about most of the free camping in Squamish. Usually, you have to drive down some random dirt road for a quarter of a mile until you reach an extremely dark and heavily wooded clearing. As if seclusion and darkness aren't scary enough, most of the time there's an industrial scrap pile, a shack with shattered windows, a broken down bull dozer, or maybe an abandoned car lurking in the corner. Then you start thinking about the rumors of crazy drug addicts trolling Squamish in search of people to rob. And if your imagination or the druggies don't get you, there's always the bears.

So after looking at horror movie sets for half an hour, we finally found a quiet parking lot on the edge of town near a community of condos. Once I convinced Lee(and myself) that the place was perfectly safe, we went to sleep. Since we survived the first night, we decided to stay there again.

WHAM!!!

On our second morning at the parking lot we got woken up at 5:30am by a very loud noise. At first we thought somebody was harassing us, but after looking around, we found nobody. Then I started to look at what I assumed was a gas tank sitting about 30 feet from our car.


Straining to see in the dusk light, I sensed some movement coming from this object. Upon closer investigation I found that the gas tank was really a...
BEAR TRAP containing a newly captured BEAR!!! The loud noise was the trap door slamming shut.

If you look closely, you can see it's claws sticking out of the cage. They are just right of the yellow sign.

The look of a very unhappy Lee.

On a side note, that week three bears had been captured and killed because a person had been attacked by a bear. Hopefully this bear was simply transported further from civilization. Good luck buddy.