All’s Quiet On the Drilling Front

For several years, I was pretty focused on new route development in the Roaring Fork Valley. There were three cliffs in particular that we had a vision for, knowing that when they were complete they’d offer fun, unique climbing that was much closer to town than anything currently established. There were only a couple of us toiling away at adding routes, and it was a lot of hard work. Finally, in about 2007, the crags were developed enough that whether you were in the mood for granite, sandstone or something else, you’d have about 50 pitches to choose from at each spot.

Since then, my focus has moved more to actual climbing, and less developing, though I’ve authored a few random routes here and there at the Gash, East Elk and Independence Pass. There are entire CRAGS waiting to be established within an hour of town, and several motivated locals are still working away at making these a reality. In fact, I just received an email from a friend, raving about this beautiful new wall with potential for two dozen routes from 5.10 to 5.12 on beautifully featured stone, at 9000 feet. Sounds perfect, I replied, let me know when the trail is in and you have some ropes hanging that I can jug. Because, as nice as it sounds, the truth is that route development is crap-ton of work. My friend Tristan has a great post about that very thing today that I think sums it up nicely:

I bolted a new route today, and it got me thinking how stupid putting up new routes is. It’s stupid because of all the work that goes into it. Now, I know that there are still plenty of yet-to-be-climbed splitter cracks out there that require no cleaning or anything, but let me tell you what I went through today for a 50-foot tall, six- bolts-long limestone sport route:

• Sorted through all of my bolting gear and decided what to take and what not to take. Grabbed some bolts and hangers and made sure I had anchors. Loaded it all into a backpack, grabbed my rope, and threw the whole lot into my trunk.
  
• Drove to the area and parked. Hiked and bushwhacked (how’s that for an unpleasant combination) up a steep scree slope for five minutes to the base of the soon-to-be route. I wanted to see what the best approach was, and wanted to make sure I still felt like the route was worth bolting.
  
• Slid/fell down the death scree back to my car and further evaluated what gear I’d need.
  
• Packed it all up into a hideously heavy and unbalanced pack and somehow crawled my way back up the death slope (it really isn’t that bad but with a heavy pack it sucked pretty bad) to the base of the route.
  
• Got my harness, the drill (with battery), bit, wrench, brushes, hammer, and Gri-Gri out of the pack and bushwhacked left along the base of the cliff until I could cut back right on yet another steep scree slope up to the top of the cliff. More hideous bushwhacking. Oh, and it was 96 degrees F today and I was in the sun.
• Got to the top of the cliff and looked over the side, seeing where a good spot for the anchors would be. The rock at the top was crap, so I didn’t want to have the anchors there. I put a couple bolts in further back from the lip, anchored one end of the rope in, threw the rest of the rope off the cliff, and started to rappel down.
  
• I found some good rock to put anchors in and I started to drill a hole. My battery died halfway through the hole. I spent the next half hour cleaning off loose blocks on rappel. A few evil blocks nailed my backpack at the base of the route, but luckily they missed my rope. The rock is good but there’s more lichen than I thought there would be.

Read the rest here.

And like he says, that’s just for one, six bolt route. Longer and/or steeper routes take even more effort, and the chossier the rock, the longer you’ll be there as well. And it’s not like you can do this stuff on a rest day, because it’s brutally hard work. And while it makes you strong in a hard to kill, alpine climbing sense, it does very little for your climbing technique and finger strength. And so for the last couple of years, while I still really enjoy the creative process of new routing, it’s been nice to go out and just enjoy the cliffs we worked so hard to establish.

So for now, I’m content to add a route here and there, and mostly just enjoy climbing for climbing’s sake. But I’m always drawn to undone lines, and maybe I’m just recharging my batteries for another surge of route development, once the memories of how hard it is truly fades.