First Ascents in Indian Creek

Looking out at the Bridger Jack Towers in Indian Creek.

After kicking off the unemployment season and easing my knee back into play mode with a 3 day and 90 mile mountain bike trip along the White Rim Road in Canyonlands I returned to Indian Creek. The trip was so spectacular, as a group of 17 we experienced every form of precipitation while riding, pedaled along hundred+ foot drop offs, ogled desert wildflowers beyond count and remained well hydrated via the beer coolers on the support trucks!

New anchors and another opporunity to teach/talk bolting.

'The Creek' is certainly one of my favorite places in the world to climb as well as to simply exist or rather exist simply. The lack of cell service and amenities beyond the recent additions of pit toilets breaks down life in to a few simple daily tasks: rise, drink coffee, eat, climb, eat/drink beer, climb, make dinner, talk about climbing around the fire, sleep. Indian Creek is known for it's sincle rope length parallel sided cracks, splitters, and thousands of them at that. The cracks are typically free of much loose rock and with numbers like that visitors and locals can go a life time without repeating a route. I have had the opportunity in recent seasons to give back to the climbing community by reequiping routes with newer and better hardware that will hopefully prevent or mitigate anchor failures on the more popular routes. However, that being said, there are many new routes to be established, lifetimes worth in fact. This is a hobby, or rather a passion that I discovered with my former climbing mentor Skyeler years ago. This season while I have spent less time that I typically do in the desert, I've had the blessing of balancing working on hard (for me) established climbs, reequiping other routes as well as establishing new climbs. With the help of a couple of really psyched friends we have established one new splitter and have eyes on a couple others, stay tuned as hopefully some of the photos will be pretty rad (I'm practicing my cliff hangers!)

In the mean time feast your eyes on some biking, desert tower climbing and flower photos!

Snow in April in the desert?! Day 1 of the bike trip was postponed.

Getting ready for another day of climbing!

The drive out to Moab turned out to be pretty amazing!

In between squalls on the real day one of riding.

Last day of biking along the White Rim.

A nice and shady last campsite after a fairly warm day of riding.

This rather outdated anchor needed a bit o' lovin'.

Pizzam! Cactus flowers at a new cliff!

Ms. Pearce magicked up this gem of a name haha.

Working hard on new route names!

A little pigmy rattler(?) on the way to Sister Superior

Proper spotting technique while soloing the first pitch.

And the rope toss!

Ooooh a barrel cactus! Back to the car for some lunch!