Castle Rock Bouldering

Although I'd left my climbing plans for the weekend to the last minute for a change, I was lucky enough to get in touch with Sunil, a guy who emailed Will some time ago about climbing in Australia and who happens to live in the Bay Area. Despite the short notice, he graciously freed up Saturday and we made a plan to head up to Castle Rock State Park for the day.

Although it doesn't look far from Santa Clara on the map, it's a solid 25 minutes of winding, climbing road to reach the top of the Santa Cruz mountains (where the park is located). On reading the guide later, I discovered that the park is about 1000m above sea level, so it's no wonder that the road winds so much!

Despite getting an early start (at the crag by 9am), the car parks were already filling up but luckily we had no trouble finding a spot (note to self - always get to Castle Rock early).

Sunil took on the role of tour guide for the day, with our first stop being Indian Rock, a rocky spire offering a dozen or so routes up to 15m high. As we walked in I was struck by how similar the rock looked to the sandstone in Sydney - from the colour and texture of the rock right through to the large scale features it forms.

<geological digression>
From a distance, most of the rock looks remarkably similar to the sandstone in Sydney - it's all rounded and grey (although a bit lighter in colour than Sydney sandstone) and the features that it forms are all completely familiar - from the sharp little ironstone crimps to the rounded top outs to the honeycomb choss caves (called "Tafoni") - it's all much the same! About the only thing I noticed immediately was that the rock isn't "blessed" with all those annoying horizontal breaks that are such a common feature of the Sydney cliffs.

Once I started climbing I immediately noticed one minor but key difference - the grains are much finer than in Sydney and this makes the rock a lot easier on your skin. As the day wore on I also realised that the matrix that holds the grains together seems to be stronger than in Sydney too, and this, in combination with the smaller grain size, means that you don't have grains pulling out of the rock and acting like a cheese grater under your tips.
</geological digression>

Although it's a very pretty spot and has spectacular views of the South Bay, the climbing at Indian Rock wasn't particularly earth shattering. We did 4 routes (15, 17, 18, 23? TR) in pretty quick succession, but none of them were that memorable - apart from the pine trees I could almost imagine I was at one of the Sutherland micro crags! It was blatantly obvious that the bouldering would be pretty good though, so after a bite to eat we swapped the gear for Sunil's bouldering mat and headed over to the main Castle Rock area for an afternoon's bouldering.

Castle Rock is another big, blobby spire about 20m high that has several dozen boulders located within a hundred metres or so of its base. We started at a cluster of boulders called "The Magoos" - they ended up offering so many problems that we didn't bother moving for the rest of the afternoon!

After doing a couple of easy-ish warm up problems I set to work on a great looking, slightly overhanging problem (which you can see in this photo). It took me a few goes to get it (the first move being the crux), but once I had I couldn't wipe the smile off my face - an *excellent* problem!

Another highlight was on a boulder just opposite. This one involved a 3m bum dragging traverse on slopey but frictional hand holds to a 10 foot delicate slab - the final hard move involving a big reach to a small finger-lock slot and then a quick series of smears up the blank wall to pop for the slopey top out.

All in all Sunil and I spent close to 4 hours bouldering, and the only thing that stopped us was fatigue (as opposed to the bleeding tips I'm more accustomed to in Sydney!). Great stuff!

If I were to describe the place in relation to a crag in Sydney, I'd probably say it's a bit like taking the "Eastern Bloc" (from the Frontline at the Balkans), filling in all the breaks, copying it several hundred times and then scattering the copies through a lovely pine forest perched along a ridge top.

Sound tempting? :-)