Valley of the Moon, Climbing meet up

Headed out to the Valley of the Moon again for some climbing. As I made my way up the hill, I ran into two people hiking up. I gave them a ride and found out they were part of a rock climbing "meet up". They had about 12 people already up at Patina wall climbing. After parking at the top of the pass, we kicked over to join them.

Crowded belay area

Two climbers on Patina wall

All the meet up crew made for a pretty crowded climbing area. The good part was they were better climbers than myself, so I could climb top rope after they led. I only managed to re send tech 9, after about half the group left to climb at leaning tower.

On the hike back to the parking, I passed a boulder than needed to be climbed. I found two climbs on it.

Crack on the back of the boulder

Victory

-James

Lele Kawa

Going vertical at Valley of the Moon, CA

My first time to the valley of the moon didn't go so well as far as climbing goes, but that one was just an exploratory trip. This time I headed up with the Yuma Climbing Club, so they knew where we needed to go.

Here is the road in looking back from the main climbing areas.

Mostly we spent our time on Tech 9. This was my first outdoor climbing since Saudi Arabia, almost two years ago. This was a fun route. It was about 3 times as tall as the routes in Saudi. It was tiring but I didn't have to hang at all.

After we all took a few runs at Tech 9, we moved over to a mixed route. There were three bolts on the bottom, then it was a trad climb up a crack. None of us could move past the bolts on the bottom. We need some beta to make that transition from sport to trad.

Exploring the Valley of the Moon

No rock climbing here in Yuma, but looking online there were some suggestions to go to Valley of the Moon in CA. Of the three places around Yuma to climb all about 90 minutes drive away, this is the one that had the most info about it.

I picked up a rock climber I barely knew and loaded with my iPad with maps and info from Rockclimbing.com we headed out. Missed the dirt road heading up there at first but after reviewing the map managed to find it. The first two miles aren't too bad if you have a high clearance SUV or truck. At the two mile point you hit a fork in the road. The road heading down to the valley is pretty bad. Two bad for my stock truck to handle.

After parking the truck we hiked in the cold about a mile to the first rock climbing area, tombstone. There were some other climbers there working the sport routes there. So we looked around for some other routes. There was a lot of choss, so it was hard to find any other routes to climb.

We tried a little bouldering, then found a nice little trad crack route. By the time we were done on that crack the sun was heading behind the mountains, so we called it a day, even though we hadn't got much climbing in. The trails and sights were pretty awesome, even if the climbing wasn't.