Gold Bar Boulders - Clearcut June 8

Joel called me at 3:30 or so to see if I wanted to hit up the Gold Bar Boulders with him and Jian. Hell yea, no question! Velvet wanted to go to, so we all met at 4:30 at my house in Monroe and headed for GB.

The gate was closed, as I had read elsewhere, but we were able to take the semi-hidden path to the left of the gate and squeeze Joel's Toyota through there. The road up is in terrible condition compared to my last trip up there about a year ago. We headed up the left side trail and parked just before the end due to a road washout.

We headed to a huge boulder with an anchor on top so Joel set up a TR. The first route was about 5.7ish and has a few fun moves. I then headed up to a boulder just up hill from the huge boulder and started working a line up the left side. After a couple tries, I had Joel and Jian spot me and I sent the problem, probably a V0+. Joel sent it as well. Jian wanted to work the much harder right side, so we all tried that for a while... making very little progress. Joel then moved the rope over to the other arete of the huge boulder and we TR'd that route... somewhere in the 5.10 range we decided.

Next we headed up the trail to some more boulders with obvious chalk and route on them. Many are in need of cleaning, as the tops were mossy on many lines. We worked on a tough over hung route and I was able to link a couple hard moves to the top, but none of us could figure out the very hard sit start variation. We moved up hill from there to a really nice boulder with a couple great problems on it. The harder route on the arete had a very tough sit start that only Joel was able to pull off. From there you move up to some side pulls and a flake before a committing top out. The other route (probably V1) was a fun traverse to a top out which Joel, Jian and I did. Velvet worked the route too and made great progress, epecially one huge lunging move that she was able to pull off one time before she was pumped. It will not be long before she is all over these boulders. After that we headed back to the truck for a quick beer before the ride out. Good times in Gold Bar.