Tips for The Black

Having done a smattering of the weekend warrior routes on either side of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, here are a few things that I've noticed...

Late in the day, shady, still sweating in a t-shirt

1. It's always hotter down there. Even the north-facing routes in the vicinity of the Astro-Slog rappels get sun until around 1pm in late spring. Your car is the coolest spot you'll be in all day.
2. Wear Long Pants - Even though it's warm, long pants are your friend vs grainy stone and poison ivy. When Nate and I went down the 'Prisoner of your hairdo' gully in late spring, we were wading through huge thickets of poison ivy. But with long pants, we didn't notice a thing.
3. Free Camping - Can be found just outside the park entrance on the north and south rims, where the land is owned by the BLM.
4. Free Entrance - to the south side's NPS area, requires getting past the gate before 9am on weekdays, and probably earlier on weekends.
5. Yes, both sides are the same height - When looking across the canyon, it's easy to convince yourself that the other rim, towering above, must be taller than the wall you're on. It's not.



Ending another wandery pitch

6. Bring LIGHT approach shoes - The gully approaches don't require much scrambling or downclimbing, so an ultralight pair of old running shoes will be a lot lighter to climb back up with, and wont slow you down on the approach. 
7. Know your line - Routes can be wandering and have dead-ends that look like the way. Take a picture of the wall and use your digital camera screen to figure out where you are and where you are going.
8. The worst rock - is often the stuff immediately in contact with the pegmatite layers. It's darker and looks better, but it got "over-cooked".
9. Bring many slings - Every route I've been on has splitter pitches and meandering pitches, and it is often hard to tell from one belay where your next will be. Lots of slings are your friend, quickdraws are not.

My Black Canyon Climbs - In order of Quality

Scenic Cruise - One of the nation's best 5.10 routes. 4:55 (second time up it) with Scott - I lead the 2nd half in evening shade.

Journey Home - 25' of 5.9 R (but not X) face climbing leads to 4 or 5 pitches up a  steep corner, consistent at 5.10- and easy route finding.

Astro Dog - The canyon's classic 5.11?  I'll have to climb Stoned Oven to see which is better. Mostly 5.10 with 3 harder pitches. Leave water and food for yourself at the rap anchors you use to descend, then you can encounter these prizes on the return up the wall.

Comic Relief - Right Side - If you take all the right-hand (harder) variations, you can climb 5 of the route's 6 pitches completely different than the left-side options.

Trilogy - Excellent crack and face climbing, bakes in the first half of the day. Neither climber should fall on the 5.10- traverse on p1.

Atlantis - A LONG route, in the sun all day. Lots of face climbing on good rock.

The Flakes - 1800' of mostly 5.10 crack climbing. Oh yeah, and that chimney is 120' of no gear. Good rock, but legitimately x rated.

Checkerboard - The first couple pitches are forgettable, but the last couple are fun and exciting. Eldo-style in the Black.

The Dylan Wall - Some chossy roofs but very good rock at the crux pitch.


Escape Artist - A couple good pitches, nice and shady most of the day.

AstroDog

My friend Scott made a great little video about our climb of Astro Dog, the first time we'd been to the South Rim of the Gunnison River Canyon.

Who the Hell?

There were 3 separate visits to this webpage (all on Sept 6th) directed via Google after someone had searched "Who The Hell is Blake Herrington".


Sometimes I wonder the same thing...


I was in the Black Canyon with Scott Bennett for 3 days last week:



Day 1 - Scenic Cruise (3 pitches) into "The Dylan Wall" (now free at 5.12a) and we decided against a boiling-hot continuation via 'Twisted' so we finished on Journey Home and still got fried.

Day 2 - We climbed the Checkerboard Wall (morning shade), then went down to the river and swam, had lunch, and waited for more shade on other aspects. A couple of the key pitons are gone from Checkerboard Wall (including the only piece after the post-crux runout) so it's a little more serious than the guidebook describes and also would host a few more routefinding conundrums if you spend time searching for now-vanished pins.

 Scott insisted we had to climb the Scenic Cruise because he "sure as hell wasn't going to walk up that gully." So we began the Scenic Cruise at 2:45 and finished the route in just under 5 hours, early enough to enjoy another lovely sunset from the overlook at 7:45.

Day 3 - We surrendered to the sun and hid on one of the North-facing walls. We climbed all the right-side variations to Comic Relief. This is a stellar ~6 pitch route, and with all the possible variations, you can climb "Comic Relief" twice, but really only climb one pitch the same. All the right-hand options are harder, but still nothing too rough. Halfway up this route, we detoured onto the 5.11+ crack pitch of Perfect Art, which Scott onsighted. There's an anchor atop this pitch, and it's a very worthy mid-route distraction from Comic Relief.

The other memorable facet of the trip was our booty count. We ended up with about 6 or 7 stoppers, a new C3 cam, 2 quickdraws, a couple other carabiners, and a pair of 5.10 Guide Tennies with quite a bit of life left in them. Hauling the extra pair of shoes up from the base of the canyon was a little annoying, especially since they clearly fit Scott's feet and not mine, but I suppose we could feel good about ourselves for reducing litter in the national park.

Black Canyon

In the last couple weeks I've made two trips to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, climbing with some great folks. The older routes there have very soft commitment grades, but newer ones seem more in-line with reality.

First off was Trilogy with Jason Nelson. The route has 100 meters of low-5th climbing, then 5 plumb-line pitches of solid climbing from 5.10 to 5.12-, then a long pitch of mid-5th class to the canyon rim. We hauled a small bag, which was actually a fun way to do the route. It allowed us to have lots of extra clothes, no shoes on our harness, good food, and it was a vertical plumb line, so the hauls were easy.

Route Beta: The 'R' rated climbing on p1 is a traverse out to the arete. It involves some up-and-down shenanigans and wouldn't be too great to fall off for the leader or the second climber. However, it's probably 5.10-. The 5.11+ crux has bolts much closer by. The long crack on p2 is sustained 5.11, without any real definite crux. On P4 I hung in the flaking pegmatite crack below the bolt. The 5.12- crux is weird. We found the section up-to and past the bolt, to be easier than the start of the pitch. The pro is good either way, but I think the crux might be before the bolt.

Take a double set to #3, and one #4.

Jason on p1 arete - Weird angle, the haul line at right is pointing straight down.

Stemming out some cool moves on the start of p3 of Trilogy



With Nate Farr, I climbed Atlantis (fairly graded a grade IV). We found the day fun and long, but the route wasn't quite as high-quality as we'd hoped. It's not on par with the Scenic Cruise. However, running out of water on p8 (of 16) when the whole route is in the sun probably fried our brains a little.

The Atlantis Topo, courtesy of my friend Evan Stevens. If only our hand-drawn reproduction of this hand-drawn copy had looked so good after 16 pitches in-an-out of a sweaty pocket.

I'd suggest 1x blue alien, then 2x gear from green alien to #3 camalot, then 1x new #4 camalot. You can get buy with only 1 #2 ans #3 camalot, but it makes belays slower and more creative, so probably not worth the trade-off.



Nate on Atlantis:

Nate and I also climbed Journey Home. Journey's a great ~.10a climb for someone who is really confident on the grade. The first pitch has some major leg-breaking ledge fall potential, with the hardest moves right off the ledge boulder. A yellow alien placed in an arch up-and-right can partially mitigate the danger here. The subsequent 4 pitches were well-protected and excellent. We bootied a "fixed" nut from the route (sans nut tool) that I traded for dinner. Major dirtbag points. Bring one #4 for the OW on the last true pitch. It's worth having.



Finally, we hooked up with my friend Neil Kauffman from Patagonia for the climb "Escape Artist". Nate led the middle of the climb in one 280' pitch, so we did the route in 4 pitches with some scrambling afterward.

Last pitch on Escape Artist

Back in Black

My friend Matt from Cilogear Backpacks was in Colorado for a week to get some rock climbing mileage under his belt and get ready for an upcoming trip to Mount Desire, for which his team had won an American Alpine Club grant.

The day before we took off from Denver, I found out that I won a Mountain Fellowship grant from the AAC as well, which I am going to put towards a July trip onto the Juneau Icefield. With good news all around, we headed out from Denver to the sporty limestone walls of Rifle, CO.

Only about 10 minutes outside Denver, Matt realized he didn't have his wallet. He'd used it to buy Star Trek tickets the night before, and afterward we had gone only to my house, so it had to be in one of two locations. After calling the theater and hearing that nobody had turned in the wallet, we assumed it must have been left at my house and chose not to turn around and drive back. More on this as the situation develops...



We rolled over the Rockies and into Rifle by early afternoon. The limestone was steep and gymnastic, definitely unlike the lower-angle trad climbing that I am used to. However, we both had a lot of fun messing about on the sport routes at the Ruckman Cave area. After half a dozen pitches we re-embarked on the road to Colorado's famed Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.



While driving we phoned my roommate to have him check on the mystery wallet's location, assuming it must be around my house. But a thorough search turned up nothing, and the mystery continued. Being 4 hours from Denver, we decided to stay and climb in the Black Canyon, rather than chase wild geese.

The Black Canyon is, like much of Colorado, fairly over-blown in terms of remoteness, scariness, or general wildness. The cracks are even halfway solid!


The setting is beautiful and unique, but the classic routes feature solid rock, easy approaches, and non-existent descents. I am sure that getting off the classics will provide more adventure than I'd know what to do wtih, but while running the risk of collapsing my soap-box from overuse, I also want to pick at two more nits about the Black Canyon.

#1 - Grades in guidebook are smaller than they appear.


Rock climbs in the USA are given a technical difficulty grade of the hardest move (such as 5.11+) and a commitment grade, describing the amount of time it would typically take a party from the base of the route to the summit of the climb.

As per the American Alpine Journal:

NCCS grades, often called 'commitment grades,' indicate the time investment in a route for an average climbing team. I and II: Half a day or less for the technical (5th class) portion of the route. III:Most of a day of roped climbing. IV: A full day of technical climbing. V: Typically requires an overnight on the route, or done fast and free in a day. VI: Two or more days of hard climbing.

Our second day in the canyon we climbed The Scenic Cruise, perhaps Colorado's best route.

There were 13 or 14 pitches, with several 5.10 pitches and the remainder was somewhat less difficult. This route has become the most popular route in the park, getting climbed in a day for 99% of its ascents. The second ascent of the route was done by Earl Wiggins, free solo, in three hours. Yet the route is given a grade V commitment designation. In reality it is more of a III+, most parties spend somewhere around ten hours on the climb.

#2: The Black Canyon is not some kind of crazy land of horrible brush and swarming ticks.

In descending two different gullies and spending 3 days in the park, we found one tick and only really observed poison ivy growing near the bottom of one gully, well off the established trail. The Black Canyon guidebook also states that in the lower 48, only Utah's Notch Peak and Yosemite's El Capitan rival the canyon walls in size, clocking in at over 2,000' tall. In addition to Montana's Mount Siyeh, the North Cascades alone has peaks such as Johanesburg, Bear, Index, Mox, Goode, and Bonanza, all of which have cliffs or faces with well in excess of 2000' of technical rock. This is not to say that the Black Canyon isn't big and impressive, but perhaps the world might not revolve around Colorado after all...

Here are some photos from Comic Relief and its variations.








-The Lightning Bolt Crack -

For the Scenic Cruise we opted to start late and get afternoon shade on route.

There is a famous quote that states "The average person thinks he isn't". This especially applies to climbers. And thinking ourselves above-average climbers, we made little effort to hurry up the route. The result was a final pitch climbed in near darkness, but an extra large smile on my face as I topped out and clipped into the overlook guard-rail to belay Matt up to the final pitch.





Matt's newly resoled climbing shoes gave him a frightening blister on his heel, preventing another day of climbing. However, upon returning to Denver, Matt snuck into the movie theater we'd been to, walked into Star Trek halfway through the film, sat down exactly where he had been 4 days prior, and used my Petzl headlamp to find his wallet sitting on the floor where it had fallen out of his pocket before our trip began. It makes you wonder how long the moldy popcorn must hang out in those theaters...