I’ve bouldered in a bunch of places around the world and it’s pretty hard to beat Squamish. But Red Rocks in Nevada is pretty nice as well, and I’ve had good times there over the years. My most recent trip there was special because I was climbing with my son and one of his friends. For starters the area is nice because it’s a pretty easy one day drive from home, but the big draw however, is the stellar quality of the rock. We arrived at our hotel pretty much at the same time. Even though we left the pads in the cars the room was full of all the crap the boys brought with them. Mini Finger Boards, Battery powered fans, Battery powered lights, a thera-cane, a thera-gun, dumbbells, a rope, (a rope?), and various herbal remedies…
This spring was a very wet one, and it had been raining for several days straight prior to our arrival. For those who don’t know, sandstone is very friable when it’s wet, and can take a day or more to dry out before you should climb it, without risk of damaging the rock. Unfortunately for us our first day was a bust. There are a lot of different areas around Red Rocks to boulder, but there is one place in particular that has the highest density of quality problems, and that’s where we were headed. We drove out to Kraft Boulders just to check things out, but it was readily apparent the conditions wouldn’t allow us to be climbing there that day. We knew it, as did the crag hag with the three legged dog who was bawling us out for even being there… Believe it or not we hit up the climbing gym. What else are you going to do? We had a good session, but we were constantly looking out the window and checking both the weather, and the wet rock forecasts. We were becoming cautiously optimistic about being able to climb the following day.
The wet rock forecast gave us the go-ahead, so early the following morning we were the first climbers there. I was still neck deep in my R3 training, so before joining Doug and Dean on the blocs I went for a totally big fun trail run around Kraft Mountain. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable trail runs ever. Steep sections, great hard pack, technical scrambling, wading through thigh deep water… it had it all.
I got back to the lads and traded my trail runners for rock shoes. By this time other climbers were slowly starting to show up. Some of the more popular areas were… popular. Almost swarmed. That being said we always seemed to be able to have areas relatively to ourselves. We spent a pretty long day on a variety of problems. Doug and Dean are wicked strong and had a tick list of stout problems. I was decidedly out of climbing shape because of my trail running focus as of late, plus to add another lame excuse, I was nursing a sore shoulder.
Day two had us going a bit further afield and doing some exploring. The lads got a chance to really show their stuff on some classic problems. Most of these (well… all of them actually…) were well above my pay level. Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun scrambling about, watching the youths, and taking photos. I was still able to get a few worthwhile things done however.
Another nice thing about Las Vegas is that there are some nice places to eat, if you are into that sort of thing. We ran through the gamut. Mexican at Eddie’s, Sushi at NeNe, and Oysters at Shucks. But the best hands down is a place I would drive up to Vegas just to go to dinner is a place called SK Seafood. Possibly the best Chinese food I’ve had in North America, outside of Vancouver, and Toronto.
Unfortunately our short trip was coming to an end. We were worked, and it was time to head home. We had had a great time hanging out, talking smack, eating up a storm and of course doing some great climbing.