Rain Rain Rain

I think I'll try CATS today, the first time in months. No end in sight for the weather.

Nook's Traverse V8 Flash

This morning I tried to flash the traverse on the north side of Nook's Rock. After a thorough study, and before things got too warm I hopped on and made it to the hueco and finished up the V0 on the right. At some point I will check out the full traverse, starting low and left and finishing further right around the corner. This is definitely one of the best problems/routes on the mountain with great movement and top quality rock. I also have to say that the center of the West Slab is possibly the best easy problem on the mountain with the perfect angle, nice holds and the only true summit that I know of on Flag. No partiers or scramblers are likely to venture there.

Colorado Bouldering Guidebook Fiasco

The Falcon book is out and apparently it's worse than I imagined. Go to B3bouldering for more specifics. I hope that every guidebook publisher can learn something from this fiasco. Both the author and the publisher should retract the book and seriously reconsider the project. I personally can't recall a more spectacular failure in the history of climbing guidebooks.

It will be interesting to see if any of the magazines decide to pick up the story. The angle as I see it is that we are increasingly in a post-guidebook era where new areas and even word-class testpieces are in a kind of fluid state of documentation that is ever evolving and changing over time. Falcon was trusting in an older model of recording climbs that depended on a single expert setting down an agreed upon body of problems. The new model is one where users of the "book" rewrite it as it is being written and a tentative consensus emerges within a self-created community. Hence the importance of online guides such as Mountain Project and the new generation of blog guides, as exemplified by Chip's Flagstaff guide. Eventually with new bandwidth capacities, video guides will be common for many routes and areas. This has already happened at Fontainebleau, where a single book could never encapsulate 15, 000 problems.

The move is more and more to "lifestyle" guides that emphasize beautiful visuals which climbers will buy not as references per se but as accessories that enhance the sense of pleasure they get from visiting an area. This is a very significant change that both Wolverine and Sharp End have moved forward on. Falcon, which I do not sense is run by climbers, is way behind the curve on this trend.

Battaglia's Bottom V7/8 Video

Another hidden gem at Flagstaff. Short, steep and good holds. Well worth a visit.

Cryptic Magician V7/8 Flagstaff Mountain

Cryptic Magician is one of the great problems on the mountain with technical and delicate movements and a little bit of exposure at the finish. I was hoping to flash it but took a few tries to get it. My beta seems more straightforward than some descriptions I have seen.

Updates

Well I have gotten off dawn patrol as even lower chaos was too hot at 7:30 and I was clearly not getting much sleep. A visit to the graham boulder left me feeling like I had the beginnings of elbow tendinitis, a sign I am not getting enough recovery time. The conditions were too warm but maybe this week things will begin to cool down a bit.

Getting closer on the first V10 crux on the Spotdala, a likely V13 crimp problem I set at the Spot. Daniel Woods and Tyler Landman had a crack at it yesterday and said it was pretty hard.

Otherwise not much to report. I heard that Heart of Darkness, a 5.13 I put up in Boulder Canyon has substantially broken leaving a likely 5.14 which is great news. Another project!

Visit my Boulder Canyon Guide and check out updates for the Graham Boulder and Castle Rock areas.