Park Daze

Jack Lester Diamond Horizon V5  Upper ChaosSummer 2016/2017 — **Jack Lester Diamond Horizon V5 Upper Chaos**
**Summer 2016/2017**

“What’s the worse that can happen?” I told Nina Williams in the summer of 2016. A Rocky Mountain National Park ranger swung his arm in a circle, turning people around at Moraine Park, 4.5 miles below the Bear Lake parking lot and trailhead to the Chaos Canyon Boulders. I eyed the pickle suited ranger and said, “Punch it!”

Earlier that summer, we’d followed Hunter Damiani and Jack Lester past this very kiosk, passing the rangers there. We’d hiked to Upper Chaos in the snow, climbed on some of the great boulders, watched Jack do the first ascent of Diamond Horizons, and left exhausted. I figured we could pass the like we had with Hunter and Jack. Nina gassed the engine and flew by the ranger’s kiosk. I figured we’d be up at the parking lot in ten minutes and at the boulders in just over an hour. In the mirror I watched a ranger frantically waddle to his patrol car. Twenty minutes and one $300 ticket later, we were heading back to Boulder.

“Bear Lake Parking Full” blinked the roadside sign. From May until late September, the rangers at the National Park close the upper parking lot, relegating folks who fail to make it before the 7:30am closure to take a shuttle bus. After the expensive parking ticket, I’d shied away from the alpine bouldering outside of Estes, Colorado. The following year, Nina and I made a few more missions to the park and I started to enjoy the climbing around Lake Haiyaha. However, I became overstoker, climbing above the jagged talus by myself with little foam. After falling off the top of Tommy’s Arete (V7), missing my single pad, and scraping my elbow, I decided to be more careful. A few weeks later, I hiked to Lower Chaos canyon after work, warmed up, tried my project, and then decided to repeat Revenge (V6). I slipped my single pad under the crux and flicked on my headlamp. I stuck the steep moves through the bulge and traversed into the finish. I pulled onto the rounded top out and started to mantle. That’s when my foot slipped. I crashed down onto the rock below. One foot cracked against the small boulder below. The other foot twisted and I crumbled in the cave. I screamed. I was a mile from the car with no cell service at 10pm. My feet hurt. I gathered up my gear, shouldered my pad, and gingerly walked back to my car, stopping every fifteen minutes to rest and take off my shoes. By midnight, I had passed out in the backseat of my van. The next morning’s x-ray revealed my largest metatarsal bone on my left foot had cracked. I wouldn’t be able to wear a climbing shoe for 8 weeks. Between the ticket and the broken foot, I doubted Colorado’s best bouldering area was worth the effort.

**Nina Williams on Skyscraper V5 Lower Chaos**

DAY 1 Summer 2018

Ten Days, I told myself at the end of May 2018. I’ll spend ten days in the park to get ready for fall bouldering in Yosemite. I reasoned that crimping on the banded gnesiss and mandatory three miles of high altitude hiking would help me send Midnight Lightning during a planned November trip. In May, Nina and I marched our pads to Lower Chaos. Feet of snow buried many of the boulders, as was to be expected during the early season bouldering. Most of RMNP stays covered until June and some problems remain buried until July. Two years before, I had tried the tk foot tall Skyscraper, a series of crimps that lead up a sloping section, an arete, and the crux V5 moves. I had climbed up and down this section in the summer, but taking the 20 foot fall from the crux seemed too high for me. While I would often climb highballs by preinspecting them with a rope, climbing ground up felt too dangerous, and hiking a rope up to this boulder seemed like more effort then it was worth. When Nina and I arrived to the boulder in the early season, we had to kick snow out of the base to start it. What had been a stand start the previous summer was now a sit start in a pit of snow. With an extra four feet of landing underneath me, I climbed up the face and committed to the crux moves, topping out the boulder. The snow landing had made an enormous difference. I suddenly realized how many boulders were accessible with the snow enhanced landings. Terrorism Arete (V6) , Full Chaos (V8), Potato Chip (V7), and dozens of other boulders suddenly seemed feasible with a solid snow pack. The hiking also became more manageable as the 15 feet of snowpack in some areas meant that there would be significantly less talus hopping.

DAY 6

The lights flicked on just before sunset. Former climbing intern and now pastry chef Hailey Moore grabbed the crimps on Potato Chip (V7) at Lower Chaos and began climbing the classic Tommy Caldwell line just a few hundred feet away from Lake Haiyaha, the 10,000 foot alpine lake a little less than two miles from the parking lot. Wanting to climb after work but faced with a lack of light, a couple of boulderers had clued me in to Neweers studio lights which feature 160 LEDs and weigh a mere few pounds. They become a regular part of my climbing kit along with my down jacket, rain jacket, shorts, snacks, chalk, liquid chalk, three brushes, two pairs of shoes, more snacks, two crash pads, and my requisite obsession with being light and strong. While the afterwork sessions required a bit more effort, in many ways they were easier. The Bear Lake parking lot emptied around 4pm, any afternoon thunderstorms would have passed and conditions would be stabilized but most importantly, the traffic into the park would be easier. Often times, traffic would be slowed down or stopped due to three categories of wildlife: a deer jam meant slow moving traffic and one Texan tourist poking their head out the window, an elk jam meant momentarily stopped traffic and a minimum of three tourists waddling on the shoulder, and a bear jam meant tourists stopped in the middle of the road, hazard lights on, slamming doors, searching for their video camera, possibly a collusion, and at least a dozen people with tripods setup watching smokey poop in the woods. With the lights, and psyched boulderers, the traffic jams could easily be bypassed.

DAY 9

Cameron Maier, Adam Stroup, and I headed to Lower Chaos where they ran laps on Potato Chip. Wanting to get home before midnight but still climb, we started hiking back to the car around dark. At the junction of the Dream Lake and Glacier Gorge trails, we headed north and marched through the woods to the White Wizard boulder. The boulder features a bit of white quartz, a twenty foot face, a few projects, and the thuggy line of White Wizard. It’s also one of the few classic problems that Jamie Emerson excluded from his Rocky Mountain National Park guide book. The current guidebook, Rocky Mountain National Park & Mount Evans published in 2011, contains a select of the best problems around RMNP. Most of the climbing in the lower sections of the park, Lower Chaos, Emerald Lake, Moraine, and roadside boulders like the Veritas Boulder, have seen significant traffic over the years. While there remains a number of close to the road problems that await first ascents, the best climbing rests in the upper reaches of the park, in the gully between Hallett Peak and Otis Peak. Maybe thirty days, I told myself.

**Robin O’Leary working the Marble (V10)**

DAY 16

I charged up the hill at the end of June, quickly kicking steps to the Upper Upper Chaos boulders, wanting to check out The Abyss (V8) before the snow landing melted out. Nina dragged up the hill behind me, exhausted. A week before she had hopped off a boulder problem and badly bit her tongue. The damage had been so bad that she’d been on a liquid diet and dropped to her lowest weight since high school. We warmed up quickly, and I went to work trying to decipher the arete. At 8pm, we headed over to The Shining (V13), a long roof problem that Nina had been working on. Her first try, she floated through the crux but fumbled her heel. She tried again and easily dispatched the problem, her second V13 ever. Motivated by her ascent, we returned to the Abyss, and having rested, I also sent my project. We glissaded down the snowy hill back to the car flush with success.

“I dabbed,” Nina told me as she stood on top of The Automator (V13) later that week. While rounding the corner of the low, tk move boulder problem her back had crazed the pads. She’d been trying the problem on and off for years. The problem breaks down to a tk long V10 at the beginning to a final V10 crux single crux move at the end. “I’m gonna try it again.” She had begun eating solid food the past few days but remained light as ever. She reached the crux move, grabbed the tiny holds, and dispatched, sending her second V13 in a week.

DAY 22

“We found you!” Madeline Sorkin said, breathing heavily as she and Sarah Shaw set their packs down below Wolves of Heaven, a Jamie Emerson V7 compression line two miles from the Bear Lake parking lot at just below 11,000 feet. As my excitement for RMNP bouldering grew, I had started hiking further up the hill, exploring the boulders of Upper Upper, the talus field in the west to east running bowl between the northern Hallet Peak and the southern Otis Peak. A few climbers began exploring the area as early as 2001, picking a few of the plums but deciding against hiking so far. The majority of boulderers climb at Emerald Lake or Lower Chaos, which both sit roughly a mile from the parking lot. The intrepid head to Upper Chaos, which sits another ¼ to 1/2mile further west. While the hike isn’t far, it requires navigating more talus and can take up to two hours. Hiking another ½ mile and roughly the same amount of time brings you to Upper Upper, which began getting more traffic in the past few years. Though Madeline had spent significant time climbing in RMNP, she had mostly clipped widgets on the Diamond, which sits four miles south east of the boulders and requires a different approach and mindset.

DAY 25

There aren’t any moderates up here, I thought. As a boulderer of mediocre ability and excessive ambition, I’d found myself hiking to Upper Upper Chaos and scowering the area for climbs I could do. Emerald Lake had Beginner’s Luck, a classic V2 climbing out of a hole, Lower Chaos had Topaz, a V2 traverse just off the trail, and Upper Chaos had Trout Fishing in America V1. In Upper Upper, there seemed to be a dearth of moderates. They didn’t mean that there wasn’t new climbs being established. Most RMNP boulderers focus on projects. Navigating the talus and then padding up different problems tends to be laborious so circuiting becomes difficult. That didn’t stop the never ending development in the park though. New problems had sprung up across the RMNP that season with the majority falling in the double digits like Dave Graham’s Cat Ranch (V14) in Lower Chaos, Dustin Saunder’s Doppelganger Poltergeist (V13) in Upper Upper, and Daniel Wood’s Box Therapy (V16), 5 miles south near Thunder Lake. With all the hard climbing, there remains plenty of easier moderates to be plucked, especially for those willing to make the long hike. Just two hundred feet from the classic Wheel of Chaos (v14), I found Analog Arete, a series of cool crimps and slopers above an abnormally flat landing. On the Contents Boulder, I established a fun V5. There were moderates to climb, I just had to look for them.

Chris Weidner Disatrophe (V6) — **Chris Weidner** **Disatrophe (V6)**

Day 28

Blake Rutherford found Disatrophe, located on the southern section of the Upper Upper Chaos talus, around 2005. With excellent rock, a line of perfect crimps, and a satisfying finishing jug, the problem stands out as one of the best of its grade in the park. It also features a typical RMNP landing. “You can step off at any move,” writes Rutherford in the Emerson guidebook, “but really can’t fall.” Coming off the problem would mean pinballing down into the slot where the problem starts, and if you get hurt in Upper Upper, it’d be a hard hike out. Being able to step on and off the boulder does make sending them significantly easier. Instead of constantly going ground up and then falling off at the hardest moves, the crux can easily be figured out by pulling out. This made sending boulder problems fell more like redpointing a hard sport climbing. When I started at the beginning, I’d often have all the moves sorted and have lowpointed it already, climbing from just before the crux to the finish. This made climbing some of the dicer boulder problems feel safer and more secure.

Day 30

Max hiked to the boulders to meet Josh Wharton and I in Upper Upper Chaos. A climbing ranger, Max spent most of his time patrolling the more heavily trafficked areas like Emerald and Lower Chaos, educating people on Leave No Trace practices. Doing the hike up the trail, I’d often come across human waste and long trails of toilet paper littering the trails. I started bringing a small reusable bag for trash. My first few times to the park, I admittedly walked past the refuse, figuring someone else would pick it up. When I began seeing the same mountain of toilet paper along the trail, I realized that “someone” would have to be me. As I spent more time in the park, it became more important to me for it to be maintained. In my early 20s in Yosemite, I used to call the rangers “pickles” for their green uniforms. But seeing what the rangers do how they help to educate park users and keep the parks clean, I began to appreciate them more.

**Sarah Ellen climbs on Wyoming Chinese (V7)**

**Dustin Saunders on the FA of Doppelganger Poltergeist (V13)**

DAY 35

“It’s a story about a dark obsession with twins,” Dustin Saunders told me about naming the first ascent of Doppelganger Poltergeist after Dennis Johnson’s short story in The Largresse of the Sea Maiden, “Those living estranged and deceased.” It’s coincidental that high in the talus of Upper Upper Chaos, the problem would be established by Dustin, who haunted the boulders along with his identical twin brother Brad. Isabelle, who also has a twin sister, made the second or third ascent of the roof problem, which splits off the Shining. Both twins, Dustin and Isabelle, seemed to be ghosts in the boulders. Despite my constant presence in Upper Upper, I rarely saw either of them. The talus bounces sound off the wall and beyond the chirp of pikas, I could sometimes hear them. Crunching snow meant that Dustin would be walking up to Omega 3, another steep roof near the jade lake of Upper Upper. Scratching meant that Isabelle was digging snow and ice off a new project by Cat Ranch.

DAY 38

Sitting on the west side of the Colossal Boulders, around the corner from Jimmy Webb’s Flying Pinata (V12) and Daniel Wood’s Black Widow (V12), lay a series of perfect slopers that diagonal out of a hole for over twenty moves. Ryan Silven established the first ascent of Tour De Rails with Webb establishing a lower start in the summer of 2018. After hiking up to the boulder four times and only sticking the crux move a few times, I considered giving up. While resting, I began pawing at the holds just to the left. A couple of good holds sat just off the main path, requiring a few more but easier moves. I began quizzing boulderers about how to start boulder problems. Do hand holds matter? Foot holds? Or is it just a body position? What about climbing a different sequence? Are you still doing the problem? After quizzing a dozen climbers on the way up, my question remained unanswered. There was how they did it in Font, which followed more of a body position and number of pads for starting positions or how they did it in America, which meant start holds. As for sequences, well some people cared and others didn’t. My next session, I topped out the problem via my variation, wondering if I’d sent the problem or if I’d done Detour de Rails.

Star Pais Ball Sports V8 — **Star Pais** **Ball Sports V8**

DAY 40

Located west of the Upper Chaos meadow and east of the main collection of Upper Upper Choas, sits a collection of boulders. The Ball Sports boulder can easily be seen from the trail for the large white streak splitting through the darker gneiss boulder. “These bands are created by like minerals separating during metamorphism; the lighter bands are composed of more felsix minerals dominated by silica, while iron-and magnesium-rich minerals dominate the darker bands,” writes Hayden Miller in the alpine geology section of Emerson’s guidebook. I worked this problem late in my season. I’d begun working down from Upper Upper and closer to the parking lot. Sitting between Upper and Upper Upper, I often passed this problem but I neglected to try it early in the season when the snowpack made the difficult mantle safer. Star climbed into the scoop with a desperate knee. I managed to get into it a bit smoother but climbed into farther left above a sharp rock landing. Regardless, the line remains one of the more aesthetic in the park.

DAY 48

Daniel Woods motored up the trail towards Emerald Lake. His thin legs pushing him fast into the alpine. Established bouldering in the park dates back to the early 1990s when Jim Hurst first climbed In Your Face, what is now known as the popular The Kind (V5) at Emerald Lake. With a few other Estes climbers like Dean Potter, Steph Davis, Bronson MacDonald, and Ian Glas all helped Hurst explore the one of America’s first alpine bouldering area. In 1998, Mike Caldwell hiked to Lake Haiyaha hoping to catch some trout in the lake. He noted all the boulders and told his son, Tommy who headed up there with Herman Fiessner, Theo Merrin, Brian Capps, and Nick Sagar. The climbers began developing the boulders around the lake putting up many of the classics including Tommy’s Arete (v7), Handicapps (V9), and The Marble (V10). The early 2000s saw RMNP’s bouldering boom with the then 19 year old Dave Graham establishing some of the hardest problems in the US in the park including The Automator (V13), Nothing But Sunshine (V13), and Eternia (V11). I pedaled my feet to keep up with Daniel. He’d done this hike countless times since the mid 2000s, establishing some of the hardest problems in the park including the roadside Hypnotized Minds (V16) at the Veritas Boulders, the long roof of Creature from the Black Lagoon (V16) in Upper Chaos, and the iconic 45 degree wall crimps of Jade (V14) also in Upper Chaos. At Emerald, Daniel worked the moves on Simon Hibbeler’s new edition Be Kind (V13). After sorting through the crux moves and resting, he dispatched the problem.

DAY 50

By the beginning of October, my energy for the park had waned. I’d been to the park 50 days, hiked over a hundred miles, lost a few pounds, sent 40 boulder problems between V4 and V8, and become a crimping machine. I’d scowered much of the park for moderate boulders and found most of the ones that would be easy for me to climb quickly. After sitting through a half dozen afternoon thunder storms, doing the drive from Boulder to Estes four times a week, navigating parking, and dealing with all the logistics of alpine bouldering, I needed a break. The conditions had improved to perfect projecting weather but my psyched had dissipated. Cam and I hiked to Upper Chaos so he could work on Left El Jorge, a difficult V8 traverse. After he dispatched, we hopped through the talus, checking out Aristocat (V9), Baby Otech (V10), and Pterodactyl (V9). They felt too hard, too long, and then too scary as Aristocat had a heinous move off a pinch, Baby Otech had a million crimps moves and Pterodactyl needed a bit more snow for a safe landing. We hiked out, getting back to Boulder just before midnight. We drove down the hill from Bear Lake parking. I needed to take a break from RMNP. As I got further from the boulders, my mind started churning, returning to Upper Chaos. Maybe I could pinch harder, get more endurance, and go back in the early season. Maybe I could do 75 days next year?

First published in Climbing

Color the Crag