Big Bend

B3 — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:58:18 +0000

On my last day I drove down to Moab and climbed at The Big Bend Boulders, near Moab, UT. The area is small but the rock is very good and there are several amazing and difficult problems that I would love to do. It is surprising this area gets almost no attention but I find it to be a great destination. There is almost no approach, a nice campground on the Colorado River across the street, awesome rock, flat landings, the scenery is outstanding and there are endless non-climbing things to do in the Moab region.

Big Bend

The Big Bend Boulders are also notoriously sandbagged, and the classic example is Circus Trick V4. This would easily get V7 or V8 in almost any other area, and this is probably the hardest V4 in America. Brian Capps told me he was at the area on a hot day and tried the problem for 2 hours with Chris Sharma. He couldn’t remember if Chris did the problem or not. It’s hard to imagine there is a V4 that Chris couldn’t climb in a matter of tries, regardless of the conditions.

Circus Trick climbs the far left arete, Phantom Fighter climbs the right side of the shaded overhang

There are other classic problems as well, including Chaos V8,
Scoopula V10 climbs the scoop.

The Scoopula, The Phantom Fighter V9 and Hell Belly V11. I think Hell Belly is one of the coolest problems I have ever seen, and it epitomizes feature climbing, on very high quality rock with a nice flat landing. Fred Nicole made at least two trips to Utah to make one of the handful of ascents of this classic problem.
Hell Belly V11

As the snow falls here in Boulder, it’s easy to dream about the warm sun and good rock in Moab.

B3bouldering.com » Big Bend

Big Bend