White Rock is the overspill dormer town for its much more famous neighbour, Los Alamos. This incongruous outpost of the US Department of Energy brings Silicon Valley shininess to the natural splendour of the high mesa above the Rio Grande – all on the whim of Robert Oppenheimer, who picked the location for The Manhattan Project based on fond memories of a riding holiday in the area.

The approach to the climbing at White Rock is similarly incongruous – you park on a well-to-do suburban street and head down a concrete walkway between two houses, and in less than 50m you’re on a basalt clifftop overlooking the Rio Grande. Drop down through the first cliff band and you’re at the foot of The Old New Place, one of the premier trad venues hereabouts,

with literally no signs of civilisation in sight.

Drop down another level and you get to Gallows Edge – much friendlier than it sounds, a tilted wall of highly pocketed rock.

There’s a theme of route names from The Princess Bride, including Princess Buttercup, 5.6

The Fire Swamp, 5.8

… as well as Westley and Rodents of Unusual Size. Fun climbing which would have been even more enjoyable out of the sweltering heat – it was only made tolerable by taking refuge between routes in the shade of a huge boulder. Another East-facing crag we arrived at too early!

As the sun went off we headed up and rightwards to explore Beneath The Old New Place, a stunning set of aretes and corners (dihedrals) now enjoying glorious shade.

Wailing Banshee, 11b/c certainly had me wailing. Four bolts in 70ft is quite “sporty” and the climbing is properly hard too. I scaled ambitions back for PMS, 10b, which I still found harrowing enough! Need to put some finger strength training on the winter agenda!

Looking across the Rio Grande from the nearby Overlook, you can’t quite make out our next objective – Diablo Canyon is barely a couple of miles away, but it’s over an hour’s drive to get there!

This takes you down the route of the ancient thoroughfare that linked Santa Fe with Mexico City, 1,200 miles away during the Spanish colonial era.

The road might have been improved somewhat since, but the last seven miles is a bone-shaking washboard dirt road. It’s well worth the discomfort though…

… and there’s even a primitive (free) Campground at the end, with space for four sites. There is climbing on both sides of the canyon, as well as the surrounding walls, but the main event here is the huge 100m wall of basalt directly above the camping / parking area. Winter Wall is well-named, facing due south and sheltered from the wind that sometimes whistles up the canyon. Midweek we had the place to ourselves and bagged most of the 3* “moderates” (in name only!) and a couple of harder lines. Many routes extend for 50 or even 60m, with an intermediate belay station / loweroff, but best savoured as one huge pitch.

Bosch Hogg, 5.7, is a good intro to get used to the style (and occasional fragility of the rock – helmets mandatory!)

The absolute classic of the crag is Post Moderate, 5.9 (gotta be worth a plus if done as a 50m pitch?) Mega!

We were being totally blasted by the sun even though the air temperature was a nominally tolerable low 20s, and could hardly wait for the shade to arrive – no respite until 3ish. Xibalba, 10d, gets a bit of early relief – slightly crumbly first pitch followed by a brilliant crimpy upper wall with huge rope-drag if you run them together for a 60m stamina test!

Cooler temps the following day, but still toasty. Hell Boy, 5.8+, is almost as good as Post Moderate.

… and we needed to improvise to have enough clips for the full-length routes.

Naked Lunch, 10a, is a tad harder and every bit as good as its more illustrious neighbour. Blind Faith, 11a, is even better!

Friday was warm again and the approaching weekend brought out the crowds (okay, maybe only half a dozen teams, but we’d had the place to ourselves up until then).

These factors encouraged a walk on the dark side. Early Wall is named for the VERY early start you’d need to catch the sun. Deep in the shadows we were shivering and wondering if we’d have been better off frazzling instead. We could watch the progress of a guy on Naked Lunch, and from this angle you get a great idea of the scale of the routes.

Here’s a view of Early Wall taken the previous day, with The Runway on the left and the Notch / Grotto the obvious side canyon in the centre.

We did Drunken Rednecks, 5.8, and Mile High Club, 5.9, by which time the arrival of a couple more young local teams had at least reassured us that we hadn’t completely misjudged the conditions (though frozen fingertips suggested otherwise!)

Good climbing conditions though, so I racked up for Aviatrix, 11b/c, which turned out to be every bit as good as the 3.5 Stars on Mountain Project promised. Fine views down the canyon with the outskirts of White Rock just visible

… and back to the campsite and across to Solar Cave and Sun Devil Wall – still sizzling. After Helen had heroically endured a very chilly belay, we de to head down into the arroyo for a late lunch and de-frost.

A gentle breeze and the stupendous Sun Devil Wall encouraged a final route. Appendicitis, 10a, (more or less up the sunny skyline in the shot above) wasn’t quite up to the standard of the Winter Wall routes but is still a pretty decent route.

Just before heading into Diablo Canyon, we belatedly spotted that there was going to be an Annular Eclipse in central New Mexico on Saturday, coinciding with our visit! A bit more Googling unearthed the fact that this phenomenon occurs when the moon passes directly in front of the sun in a more distant part of its orbit when it isn’t quite optically big enough to entirely block it – thus leaving an annular ring around it. After a quick stop at a garage we were equipped with Eclipse glasses and ready to go!

Saturday brought out the crowds at the crag, and we were grateful of the excuse for a rest day and to avoid the jostling (a near miss from a grapefruit-sized rock, dislodged when pulling our rope on one of the well-travelled routes on Winter Wall, had discouraged us from wanting company). Instead, we settled into our ringside seats to enjoy the show.

Here’s my best efforts with the 10x zoom and a bit of “Pro-mode” fiddling on my phone:

The weirdest thing about the whole experience, played out over an hour or so, was how little visual clue there was from just looking at the surroundings. The human eye is so remarkably adept at accommodating for low light levels (and so are modern smart phones) that masking 95% of the sun’s rays was no more discernable than a passing patch of haze. Much more obvious was the loss of all that thermal energy – it went from t-shirt to duvet and back as the moon worked its way across! Physics, eh!