Colorado National Monument – Otto’s Route
With The Casual Route on The Diamond and The Scenic Cruise in The Black ticked off, we’d exceeded all expectations for the trip, but still had five days left before […]
With The Casual Route on The Diamond and The Scenic Cruise in The Black ticked off, we’d exceeded all expectations for the trip, but still had five days left before […]
The Scenic Cruise is THE route to do in The Black (unless you are climbing into the 12s) taking the 1,700ft North Chasm View Wall in a dozen or so […]
There’s hardly anyone climbing in The Black – we’ve only met two teams in 4 days, both from Ouray and both knew Gary Ryan. It says something about the closeness […]
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is a legendary adventure climbing destination – over 2,200ft deep and less than 1,000ft across “… no other North American canyon combines […]
Hello Blog followers, and apologies for the gap in posts – we’ve been in The Black and there’s no phone signal (you could say a Black-Out). Normal service on Bill […]
Long’s Peak, at 4,340m, is the highest in Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s a shapely enough mountain and draws numerous hikers for the challenging “keyhole route” to its summit, but […]
After an uneventful flight we arrived in Denver just before midnight. With afternoon thunder storms forecasted and a need to get some acclimatisation in before heading up to climb on […]
This could be subtitled ‘Episode Ten in Bill and Dom’s Excellent Adventures’ after five previous trips to Yosemite, and further adventures in The Alps, Dolomites, Taghia (Morocco) and Riglos (Spain). […]
After an exhausting day of being tourists it seemed much easier to just go climbing again for our last day – but nothing too stressy! The criteria were: not far […]
The beers, shower and pizza (plus a dose of ice cream) were every bit as wonderful as anticipated – and the luxury of a humble apple served as a reminder […]
After an only moderately comfortable, but historically resonant (Robbins, Frost, Choinard and Pratt slept here – it’s like a climbing hall of fame!) night in The Igloo … it was […]
The Cyclops Eye is big – REALLY BIG! Must be over 200ft in diameter and we spent much of the day circumnavigating it. Pitch 20 is a soaring traverse up […]
We had a comfortable night on the ledge in The Black Dihedral, though the slight phosphorescence in the quartz intrusions conjured all sorts of interesting faces and features in the […]
Straight out of bed and into a 5.8 squeeze chimney – great way to start the day. Happily, pitch 11 of NAW is nothing like the horror show of The […]
What a great place to wake up… Earlish get away and the climbing is quite involved from the off. Pitch 6 has you speeding up a bolt ladder – easy […]
A leisurely start followed by an afternoon of toil. A major packathon had neatly sorted food, water and beer for 4 nights (after a quick excursion to the store to […]
After yesterday’s snafu, we at least knew where the actual start of NAW was (the other “unmistakable” triple cracks with a roof, about 50m right of SOD). We’d also blown […]
The smoke is clearing in The Valley and folks are arriving. We were up early with the intention of “fixing” – doing the first 4 pitches of North America Wall […]
Bill and I had booked flights to SFO a few weeks in advance, for a planned trip to Yosemite to climb North America Wall on El Cap. Subsequently, the “Ferguson […]
Our last couple of days climbing took in some more roadside climbing in Queens Creek. .. A beautiful campsite beneath the Superstition Mountains. .. …and an unpleasant encounter with swarming […]