Chris Weidner: Flagstaff’s ancestral legacy, contemporary challenge

Flagstaff Mountain, only a five-minute expostulate from downtown Boulder, is dirty with sandstone that, during initial glance, seems like zero special.

After all, a rocks are petite — adult to about 25 feet high — compared to a grand walls and unconditional slabs of adjacent crags such as a Flatirons, and Eldorado and Boulder canyons.

Yet climbers group to “Flag,” a ideal stadium for bouldering, where climbers can safely stand unroped, comparatively low to a ground.

But Flagstaff is some-more than only a available opening for today’s crashpad-crazed, chalk-toting mill jocks. It’s a theatre on that an successful splinter of American climbing story played out, as good as an locus of contemporary challenges.

Climbers initial set feet on Flagstaff mill in a 1940s and 1950s, when bouldering was deliberate zero some-more than training for longer routes and towering climbs.

But it didn’t take prolonged before a handful of forward-thinking climbers such as John Gill and Pat Ament honed their skills during Flag and, as early as a 1960s, lifted mill climbing standards vis–vis bouldering.

In John Sherman’s waggish vade mecum “Stone Crusade: A Historical Guide to Bouldering in America,” Ament is quoted, “I was sleepy of a village looking during bouldering as some kind of sideshow to climbing. we unequivocally felt … that it was something loyal and genuine and current in a possess right.”

Ament’s perspective on bouldering was severely respected, in no tiny partial due to his poise of a qualification during Flagtaff. Long before gummy rubber boots and a reserve of bouldering pads, Ament determined many of a mountain’s slicing corner problems of his day, such as King Conquer (V3, 1962), Right Side of a Red Wall (V5, 1967), Direct South Face of a Amphitheater (V4, 1967) and First Overhang (V5, 1968) — all of that sojourn severe today.

In “Stone Crusade,” Sherman writes, “(Ament’s) one-arm mantel problem Right Hand Mantel … has broke generations of boulderers who felt they climbed over 1960s standards.”

Over a years, Flagstaff’s severe mill has ripped a skin of gifted climbers too countless to mention. But one internal standout was a tall, steel-fingered Jim Holloway who, in 1975, climbed a 12-foot problem on a right side of Flag’s Cloudshadow Wall.

Trice (V12) was expected a hardest stone problem in a universe during a time, though a common Holloway done no such claim. As a result, Trice remained an problematic poser until 2007 when it finally saw a second and third ascents (on a same day) by Boulder strongmen Carlo Traversi and Jamie Emerson.

‘Finding value’

Perhaps today’s many committed Flagstaff traveller is internal professor, artist, and author Peter Beal.

In further to repeating many of Flag’s testpieces, Beal — a boulderer for some-more than 30 years — has determined a measure of new, formidable problems characterized by handholds so tiny that climbers possibly overlooked them as too painful, or were simply close down.

Indeed, while some chosen climbers impugn a mountain’s unusually pointy and infrequently lax rock, Beal is an outspoken Flagstaff apologist. On his thought-provoking blog (mountainsandwater.com), Beal wrote about because he climbs during Flag and — one can infer — because he seeks out such new climbs: “I like anticipating value in things that a mainstream ignores, that a bandwagon passes by, generally when that bandwagon represents an increasingly commercialized prophesy of a sport.”

‘Great inspiration’

Indeed, a competition of bouldering — some-more same to gymnastics than alpinism — has burgeoned into a many renouned climbing genre. New bouldering nooks and niches are agreeable some-more finger-friendly problems than Flag’s classical (read: hard) problems during a given grade, that is substantially one reason because a whopping 32 years upheld before Trice was repeated.

Number-chasers tend to drive transparent of Flagstaff.

But while Flag’s recognition waxes and wanes, a colorful characters, past to present, have left a bequest of ancestral problems that still attract a best.

Swiss traveller Fred Nicole, famous for environment universe bouldering standards for some-more than a decade, done a discerning repeat of Trice in October. He blogged on Prana’s website (prana.com/blog), “I would like to tell all my honour to Jim Holloway for his performances in bouldering, that are still good impulse for all of us.”

Contact Chris Weidner during cweidner8@gmail.com.