I woke up this morning still fully pumped from yesterday’s amazing climbing day.  I realized after a few pitches that I was mentally taxed and I probably wasn’t going to make any progress today climbing.  It sounds kind of silly but climbing takes more mental capacity than one would think.   I love being able to clear my schedule, clear my mind, and devote a whole day to climbing.  It’s hard to put time limits on climbing especially when dealing with all the gear involved with trad climbing.  That being said, after 4 or 5 full days, I needed a day off.

The day really sort of fell apart so I’ll just continue with some info about City of Rocks: It’s the first desitination climbing area I’ve been to in the US. It looks exactly as it sounds like a city where instead of houses, there are rocks.  There’s a 5 or 6 mile road going through the park and it’s not in particularly great condition.  Almo is a very small town. Oakley is a shade larger but it is 11 miles away.  I would reccommend stocking up on supplies (food, etc.) that will last for your whole stay because once you get established in the City, it’s hard to motivate to leave.

Camping in the City is $12.72/night. Reservations (mandatory on weekends) are an addition $6 (one time fee, not per night).   Some of the campsites are really sweet. There are 2 water points and a few bathrooms around.   If you are on a low budget, there’s BLM land around the outside of the park where the camping is FREE!  We ended up parking the RV on the corner of the entrance to the park.  We planned to move it to a better spot, but somehow never got around to moving it.  We arrived in the middle of the week and saw it go from desolate to crowded pretty quickly.  There are around 64 campsites so it gets  busy on the weekends.

Not to far down the road is the Castle Rock Park.  There’s amazing sport climbing there and it is not crowded at all. I think they charge $4 for motor vehicle entry. We parked down the street and rode our bikes in. All of the trails are well marked and beaten in which makes for easy approaches.  Castle Rock is well worth a few days.

Both City of Rocks and Castle Rock offer a ton of easy to moderate routes.  Evan was convinced that the grading was made easy to sort of promulgate the idea that this is a beginner friendly destination.  His found “proof” of this in his climbing folder. He had torn out pages from some magazine years ago with Castle Rock routes.  There was one that we had climbed that used to be 5.7 and now it’s 5.8.   I was enjoying my ego boost from being able to climb “harder” stuff. Oh well! I try not to get caught up in the grading anyway.