Joe's Valley 5/10/2007

Yesterday afternoon Josh and I made the drive out to the Moore Cutoff boulders. We saw the largest, most amazing boulder field I have ever seen. There were probably 100 Peabody sized sandstone boulders stretched along a 2-3 mile cliff band along the road and thousands more smaller boulders. Unfortunately, I would estimate that 90% of the rock here is choss.. Still, 10% of thousands of boulders still is a lot of climbable rock but it would take a lot of work to find them and I think the problems would be quite spread out.. If only :( ... We may head back for one day to do a few lines we saw that did look really fun.

This morning we went to the Riverside area up the Left Fork - across the road from Big Joe by The Angler. We found some shade and climbed on the next boulder over and had a good time. I warmed up by doing several V1 - V3 problems and then started working on Kelly's Arete - a beautiful V5 prow. After about 8 - 10 tries I finally figured it all out and was able to hang on long enough to get the send. It was a really scary topout for me -- really insecure holds pretty high off the ground.

After working this, we walked up and Josh tried Big Joe a bit. I was too tired so just watched.

Me doing Kelly's Arete:


Me on Chi V3:


Me on the bottom of Kelly's Arete:


Me on Kelly's Arete:


Some of the Moore Cutoff boulders: