I was headed back to Washington from a 2-week climbing trip in Montana. Google maps said 12 hours drive from Bozeman to Bellingham. I was just about to start the drive when I got a text from my friend Alex from Boulder: "Headed to the Creek for the weekend, looking for a partner, any chance you are in the area?" I checked Google maps: 29 hours drive from Bozeman to Bellingham via Indian Creek. Hmm....17 additional hours of driving for 2 days of climbing in Indian Creek? It was a no brainer.

Alex and I climbed 12 routes over the course of 2.3 days (we climbed full days Friday and Saturday, and squeezed in a few hours on Sunday morning before Alex left to drive back to Boulder). All but one of the routes we climbed are listed in the "The Best Of" list at the end of the guidebook. Daily high temperatures reached the high 80's, but we woke up early and targeted shady routes, and it was actually quite pleasant. The following gives photos from the routes we climbed.

My goal was to spend my first Thanksgiving in Colorado at Indian Creek. And I did. Well, sort of. An unforecasted snowstorm sort of cut our trip in half, but we still got in two great days of climbing and had the unique experience of seeing the Creek blanketed in snow.

I climbed in the Creek with Mike Cichon. I had met Mike at a belay traffic jam on Mickey Mouse Wall at Eldo, where we exchanged contact info after discovering we had several of the same objectives, and few weeks later received an email from him: "I'm looking for a partner—are you interested in climbing in the Creek Thanksgiving week?". Of course I was interested!

Mike and I spent our first day of climbing at The Wall, one of the more popular "new" crags and one of the few areas Mike had not been to yet. The Wall faces south, so it can be a pleasant place to climb in cooler weather, when the sun is out. Also, the Wall has a somewhat longer approach and rougher drive than other areas in the Creek, which Mike and I hoped would mean less crowded. But as luck would have it, a large group of about 20 climbers had also decided to climb up at The Wall that day, so we didn't escape the experience of Thanksgiving crowds at the Creek after all. But despite the rowdy crew monopolizing most of the area's best routes, Mike and I still climbed 7 great pitches.

That night it snowed 5 inches, a pretty abrupt change to the original weather forecasts for the week. So we drove to Moab, where we could hang out for the day. After cragging for a day in Moab and seeing how quickly the snow was sublimating in the dry air, we decided to risk the iffy forecast and return to the Creek to see if we could squeeze in one more day of climbing. And what a day of climbing it was! We climbed at Battle of the Bulge Buttress, which has one of the best concentrations of stellar 5.11 routes in the Creek, along with a very short approach and sunny aspect. Given the wall's popularity along with the climbable weather and the usual crowding during Thanksgiving week, we were (very pleasantly) surprised to be the only ones on the entire wall for the entire day. I guess everyone had vacated during the snowstorm and decided to do the turkey thing after all. It was a unique and magical experience to have some of the Creek's best splitters to ourselves, enjoying the area as it was in the 1970's. It was an ironic juxtaposition with our experience at the much more obscure The Wall just a few days previous, jockeying for position and sanity amongst lycra-clad climbers and barking dogs. Mike and I climbed seven routes, with five of them in the 5.11 range, which made for an awesome day of climbing at the Creek.

The following gives photos from our Creek adventure. Another Creek teaser trip....I'll have to come back for more.

The third time I climbed at Indian Creek was over Spring Break 2020. For the first five days I climbed with my friend and offwidth aficionado Mark Thomas. For the last day, I met up with my friend Alex and his friend Autumn for what was to be two more days of cragging but turned into one pitch due to a freak snowstorm and a notice that San Juan County had been closed to leisure travel.

The trip had a surreal undercurrent to it, due to the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak that was sweeping over the globe. When I left Boulder, there were a few thousand confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US, school had just transitioned into online mode, and "social distancing" was quickly becoming the catch phrase. But over the course of the week while I was blissfully climbing splitters in the Creek, the number of confirmed cases in the US bloomed to over 120,000, places all over the country (including back home in Boulder) were issued a "stay-at-home" mandate to try to flatten the epidemic curve, and by the final day of my trip San Juan county (where Indian Creek is located) itself had closed its doors to "leisure activity". Everyday life had changed a lot over the course of the week, but it had been nice to escape for a bit.

Below is a list of routes and photos from my 6 days in the Creek.

This was my fourth climbing trip to the Creek. Best trip yet!

xxx