The Sawatch Cowpoke

    The most interesting thing to me about Rifle Mountain Park is the fact that at first, I kind of hated it. It may sound like cardinal sin to the climbing community, but I did not take to Rifle immediately as I had to many of the other “classic” crags and locations throughout the west that many consider to be the “best” climbing areas. Yet, one day, without warning, I realized that I fucking loved the place. It was a home for me all of a sudden, with movement and holds that no longer felt foreign.      In a nutshell, I feel like that’s how Rifle molds onto many people who haven’t spent a lot of time on limestone, especially the highly-trafficked variety that many a person would find in Rifle Canyon, even more so when trying to get onto any of the many ultra-classics throughout the park. Once a place only frequented by locals going for a hike, snowmobilers, and the random ice climber, Rifle Canyon developed into one of the most prolific high-end sport climbing locations in the United

     Between the amount of times I’ve tripped into an unsuspecting cactus, or frozen the shit out of the tips of my fingers on the only cold day in a week when I decide to go there, Shelf Road holds a lot of dear memories for me. Living about an hour and a half to two hours away, Shelf Road is the preferred winter sport crag for myself, my significant other Sarah, and our climbing partners in the area. While not being able to hold a candle to the likes of places such as Rifle Canyon, or The Fortress of Solitude, similar crags about the same distance away, I believe that I could unequivocally say that no other place in our area helps develop one’s technical skills on vertical dolomitic limestone formations. Among other things, that also being that it’s practically beach weather just about every day of the winter there (unless it’s the one day that I’ve chosen to show up). Before gushing anymore about one of the better sport crags in the state, let’s first dig into the history of shelf

     The sun rose slowly over the eastern horizon, warming the rocks beneath me as I walked across the boulder field leading up to the long slabs of the North Face of Long’s Peak. I unzipped the thin layer I had on and looked behind me to see how Sarah was coming along. We were nearly at the start of our chosen route for the day, the super, mega-classic “Keyhole Ridge” (5.6 II). I had been on Long’s more times than what I could count on both hands, but upon investigating every line that I had taken to the summit, I realized that this one was not on the list. It was only fitting that for Sarah’s first time on the big rock we would do something new for the both of us. It was even more funny to me that I was doing this classic route after moving from Estes to Leadville. Sarah slowly came up behind me as we topped out on the large ramped ledge above the stone hut that marks the beginning of the more “semi-technical sections” of the Keyhole Route (4th I). From this point, we would continu