Monday, January 19, 2009

A visit to West Vancouver

On Saturday, despite the fog, I went to West Van to clean some boulders and maybe work on the trails at Area G a bit. I hooked up with couple of boulderers from UBC who are also keen to see more problems developed in the area.

We stripped moss off the top of several of the small boulders at the base of the slope - the problems there won't be very hard, but will be good warmups for the harder, taller problems up the hill. Due to all the snow, everything was still pretty wet, but it was good to get out and start getting problems ready for when it's a but drier.

We looked at some of the mini-bluffs further up the slope, and Ronald and I found an area with a nice concentration of problems. Probably a dozen lines, about half of them really nice-looking, all in a cluster. We started prepping some of those - they'll probably get cleaned up (and sent) first.

At the end of the day, we wandered down to the roadside boulder. It was finally dry enough to try the two problems that boulder holds. Ronald and I sent the harder lip traverse / arete problem fairly quickly (probably about V4), and Bill sent the easier, straight up line (probably V0).

So, Area G now has...
Problems = 2
Fully cleaned projects = 1
Partially cleaned projects = approx. 20