August 2014 Highlights, New Routes & Updates
HIGHLIGHTS:
August was hot as usuall and not to many people came to visit. Kevin Jones, Dave Schwisow and I went to the Sierra Buttes Lookout and mapped it out. This place has epic views and the climbing is rad. The boulders all sit in a very tight cluster with mainly flat landings. Considering the easy approach and mostly moderate grades I see this zone becoming popular. Kevin and I met up with Seth Carter at Loon Lake to tune up the topos given top me by Owen Summerscales. Owen’s work was spot on, which made my job easy. We pretty much just climbed, took photos and sent one really nice project.
New Routes:
At Loon Lake Owen Summerscales recomended we take a look at this project on the “Chasing Rainbows” boulder. He was right, the line looked mega and we quickly went to work cleaning it up. The line follows a perfect sweeping corner feature up the middle of the boulder, truly an epic problem. Seth let me go first on the stand and luckily I flashed it, need I even mention how it went for Seth on his try? The stand was v5 and every bit of 4 stars. Next Seth added a v7 sit which put on a few hard entry moves. At Sugar Pine we pushed from Sugar 2 to Sugar 3 and went to work on the Meadowland Boulders. This area proved to be one of the better finds of the summer. The more we explored, the more we found and it was all high quality. The Dgiff Cliff was no exception, with 6 sweet hihgball crack and face lines. Right next to it “Spice is Nice” V5 was just the right height with a crux at the top. One day after doing a fun v3 traverse along the lip of a roof, a really wicked hail storm came in. This was for sure the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever been caught in while out climbing. We all huddled under the roof and when it was all over there was 3 inches of hail on the ground. Let’s just say that naming the traverse “Hail Roof” wasn’t to hard to come up with. By the end of the month Warren Digness, Dave Griffith, Jon Thompson, Kevin Jones, Adam Selby, Chris Guiterrez, Lamberto Franco and I establised over 50 new problems from vb-v9 in this stellar new edition to Sugar Pine 3.
Updates:
The State Park service, in their divine wisdom has been really active posting signs all around Bliss and Sugar Pine saying “No dogs” by the parking areas to the boulders. Even if you don’t agree with it, rules are rules for now. Dogs are not allowed off trail anywhere in a state park in California. The rangers are on a mission, they will ticket you and you are making climbers look bad if you don’t follow the dog rules.