Spring/Summer Review

I've been wanting to to a wrap up of the Spring/Summer season for a while now. I finally got around to it and want to point out a couple of cool/notable things that have happened so far. It's always fun to look back on the past season.

Early in the season Travis Melin seemed to be on a mission to find a new "Campsite B" at Dodge. It seemed that a new area popped up weekly. While none of them turned out to be huge, a couple of them were noteworthy and definitely worth visiting. Maybe the most visited was Steve's ZZ boulders. They held the hardest new line at Dodge since the summer of 2008. Travis tagged it at V8 with a bit of sarcasm and humor tossed in for good measure. It received a couple of quick repeats from Sweaty and Mr. Eggbert who both commented on how terrifying the topout was. Remo and Dobbe followed suit and consensus on the line has come to about V7 right now. A nice, worthy addition.

We had some great spring weather for climbing a lots of people took advantage of it. On one random day at Group Camp B we saw maybe 20-30 people out at the boulders and the parking lot was full. Kind of cool to see and something that I definitely wasn't used to in Wisco.

Towards the end of April Nic and I started to talk about climbing up at the lake together. I'd been working on getting him down here for a while now and we finally met up in the beginning of May. Remo and Brian joined us at the Alpine Club and Beautiful Soup boulders. For a few weeks prior I'd been getting more and more tired of Dodge. The day that the 4 of us went out seemed to mark the start of a new life for Devil's Lake bouldering. Nic eventually sent both of the problems later that week for their first ascents since 2004, and seemingly everyone got psyched on the lake again.

Bouldering at the lake had long been somewhat defunct and I'm not sure if I ever saw anyone else at the boulders. With the help of a few instrumental people(Remo, RV, Mr. Eggbert, Rhoads and myself) life was all of a sudden shocked back into the scene. New areas started popping up on Mountain Project in the same fashion that they had last summer at Governor Dodge.

Alpine Club got an astonishing amount of attempts in the months of May and June and the Monolith area as a whole got more traffic in a few weeks than it had gotten in years. Brian was even able to coax Mr. Jamie Emerson into coming through town. While he was here he made a quick repeat of Beautiful Soup and noted that he'd like to come back at some point.

Rhoads went on a mission of taking pictures and firming up route info for as many areas as he could. At the same time he went and "re-discovered" Steinke Basin and made public the amount of bouldering potential the area held.

RV went on some sort of mission to go up to the Monolith Boulders more than anyone ever had and FINALLY repeated Venus Rising properly. The Anchorpoint boulders were put on the map again and the namesake boulder received numerous ascents. That area alone seemed to open many peoples minds into what still might be out there awaiting in the talus fields.

Other areas await even more potential and I'm so happy to see people out there enjoying the problems again. I'm only hoping it grows more throughout the year.

While there were lots of other notable sends and stories from this season there's one person I have to give credit to. Mr. Rhoads. As much as I don't like to give him credit cause it's just gonna go to his head, I kind of have to. He's been doing a phenomenal job of seeking out as many out of the way areas as possible and getting the info onto Mountain Project. He's also done some very impressive leads this year and I'm sure we can look forward to more of the same in the future.

It also works out well that in the wake of his searching, there's been a number of very cool potential boulders and one or two pretty cool routes he's found. Very well done Rhoads.

Here are a couple of fall predictions for you guys to chew on. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Alpine Club will be climbed 2 more times before year end.

Beautiful Soup will be climbed 3 more times before year end.

Keymaker will get its second and third ascent.

Perfect Medium will get sent twice by year end.

The Greatest Show On Earth will get done at least once.

I will finally RE-find Massive Vertigo.

RV and I will finally fucking do Sandstone Violence and get that shit behind us.

I think that's it for now. Let me know what you guys think about all of this. It's been a good year so far!!