About ten routes have been done on Secret Crag, some dating back to the 70s. This seldom visited wall is South facing, has several quite good routes from 70 to 100 ft in length, and is composed of excellent Eldorado sandstone. Route numbering begins on the left end (West) of the crag with (#1) Mind Control (5.10+) and continues right to Eldorado Gold (#10). The isolation of Secret Crag makes for a superb adventurous day of climbing. While most of the routes are short of 100 ft in length, some are that long and so a 60m rope is recommended. Difficulty never gets above 5.11+ and a fine bolted 5.8 was put up several years ago.
Getting There
Starting from the trail before tunnel 3 and leading up into the woods toward Ridge 4, instead of crossing the talus field, continue uphill on the right side of the talus field. Hump up to another talus field that seems to be near the top of the hill, but not quite. The idea is to get to the West end of Secret Crag. From the West end, a third class scramble leads to the right and down on to a steep slab at he base of the routes, essentially the lower tier. This gets more exposed the further down the slab you go, so be careful getting to the routes at the far end of the crag. It can be useful to carry some camming gear for the belays, since you would not want to roll off the slab.
The Classics
Mountain Project's determination of some of the classic, most popular, highest rated routes for Secret Crag:
A group of friends and I were up at Secret Crag last weekend and we got on two new routes. Help with identifying them is appreciated. We stayed to the right of the boulder field and approached the crag from the lower end. About 10' before climbing onto the ramp and heading to the other routes listed on this site, there were two routes. To access them, you had to scramble up onto a ledge with a large evergreen tree. They went through a slightly overhung area and traversed left after about 15'. One then went up a right-facing dihedral to a small overhang, went left again into another right-facing dihedral and then had wild, difficult stemming to a roof and the anchors. The other went straight up a slabby section to a dihedral that is right of the one mentioned above. Difficult slab moves with pinches and gastons led to a roof and a wild jug move at the anchors. What are these routes called? What are their grades? Thanks for the help!
We ran into, I think it was Tod Anderson, two years ago putting up a couple of new routes to the right of the others. He said were in the 10ish range. They didn't have names yet and he was still cleaning them so we didn't get to climb them. Surprised to see that he didn't post them though.
There's kind of a long story involved with these routes, starting with two years ago ripping my leg open on the hike in and having to get 20 stitches, and then this year shattering my heel and then getting a pulmonary embolism. Seems that place has it in for me. Crawling out of there is butt loads of fun though. I thought the left dihedral was 12a? & the right one 12b? The route around to the left on the face was about mid 11 and the other two routes further to the left were 10s, one being 2 pitches. I'm still trying to come up with an appropriate names for the routes, got any suggestions?
Thanks for the info, Tzilla. Those ratings sound about right. They were both great climbs. I will put some thought to the names. The left one needs to include something about the wild move out to the arete without blowing the feet. The right one is all about the desperate moves left to get into the dihedral or... slapping for what appears to be a nice bucket 3 or 4 moves from the top and finding that terrible sloper!
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