Lemon Crack Climb

This is a good splitter for Durango standards. It has a little bit of an odd ball location, but this is a fun, traditional challenge.

It starts on a ledge that is most easily accessible by rappelling into it. You start by climbing up a crack that's not the greatest rock, but the gear seems decent. At this point, the climbing starts to become difficult, and there is a funky place to protect that I couldn't find a good gear placement with besides a green Omega cam. While protected by a fairly good cam placement, but not the best rock, pull on some shallow but positive finger locks that lead to a good stance A little higher in the splitter a #6 stopper and a #0.3 BD cam went in pretty well after digging out the placements. At this point, the crack turns into a seam, which is probably protectable, but hard to place gear on. I found some really fun, positive-feeling face holds to the left of the seam, which were really committing and far apart. Those couple of moves lead to a flared hand jam and some possible air time over marginal gear. Pull the flared hand jam to a jug! You can relax a little and finally place a textbook HB placement, which I believe was a #4 HB. You climb a little higher, and the granite crack eases off and becomes a fantastic splitter from fingers to fist jams.

This is the only granite splitter I have climbed in the Durango area. It is unique to the area.

I headpointed this climb, with some traffic it would probably clean up well. I thought rope soloing the route was really fun, quick, and easy to set up. It helped me to plan the gear out before leading it.

Park at the East parking area, and head straight to the river from there. You will run into a cliff line in 5 minutes, follow the cliff line until you find bolts and chain anchors.

Offset and standard stoppers and a set of BD cams from #0.3 to #4. Bring doubles of fingers to thin hands. There are two anchor bolts at the top of the cliff.