Shelf Road

Today was, sadly, our last day of fun before heading home. 800 miles more to go, almost all of it inside of Texas. Did I mentioned that Texas was BIG in my first post when we left there? Anyhow, drove to shelf road this morning, which is the "premiere sport climbing area in Colorado" according to our otherwise useless guidebook. There are allegedly around 1000 established climbing routes in this area, 500 or so of which are bolted, which is required for our method of climbing. As was expected for a weekday, the place was completely deserted, so we had to spend awhile wandering around to try to figure out where everything was. We figured out that from the 1st parking lot we stopped at, the closest wall was a mile hike away. We tried another area further down the road, and wound up hiking in from there. Our map was very inaccurate, so we wound up hiking alot further than we had to and turning around before we eventually found some of the walls.

Now the hard part -- Finding a route on the wall within our skill range. We spent awhile walking around the base of the cliff eyeballing the bolts up there, and deciding most were well outside of our ability. Once we found one that looked promising, I attempted to climb it and quickly determined that it too was outside of our range. Drats. Some additional searching yielded another route, which I was able to setup far more successfully. Annette got stuck 1/3 of the way up or so and came back down, but Matt managed to fight his way to the top eventually.

Even though we had only climbed one route, it was getting late and we all wanted to go to dinner. We found a great place in a nearby town that made fresh pasta onsite, which is hard enough to find in Austin, much less a tiny little town in the middle of Colorado. Very tasty! Afterwards, we had planned to put some additional miles behind us, but decided to call it a night and settle in early. 800 miles to go, but we're hoping that a big 1 day push tomorrow just might get us back to home.