New Boulders

Today we drive up to the Sierra and were hoping to go the Saddle Boulders, near Donner, but there was some kind of bike race happening, and the road to where we needed to get to was closed! It turned out that we were somewhat near another of the areas which I had scoped out via google earth, but it turned out that both of the roads that google had listed were chained off, with many "No trespassing" signs. This is bad news, because it means that topozone is wrong in some places about national forest boundaries. We walked up a hill nearby and found these excellent untouched boulders with very hard looking problems

We ended up driving back to the ultra secret bouldering area which we found last weekend. There were some rednecks swilling beers, getting ready for a little huntin' and I made a mental note to be as loud as possible to avoid getting mistaken for big game and shot. We weren't quite as lucky this time and spent a lot of time getting shredded by thorn bushes without finding any decent boulders. The only ones we found were either encrusted in moss or 3 feet tall. We circled around, and were almost at the point of giving up when I saw a boulder up on a hill which looked intriguing. After a little hemming and hawing, I went and had a closer look. It had a beautiful burnt out tree which followed the contours of the rock, and two *fabulous* looking climbs on the southwest and southeast aretes: more of the stellar granite on the boulder from last time, but with bulbous knobs at the top.

It took us a while to complete the eastern arete, and even after a huge amount of effort I was unable to complete the western arete. bummer. We both had a lot less skin on our fingers by the time that we were done. We walked out and were hassled by two locals on an ATV about driving too fast on our way out. Normally I'd be happy to oblige them and slow down, but they were so rude about it that I couldn't really back down. I wasn't able to parse all of the yokel-speak, but they were clearly agitated and said something about "not minding if we used that road" if we used it on their terms. First of all, I was only going about 15 mph, and in any case its a public road. Just to be sure, I asked them if it was a private road. They said that it was a Forest Service road, to which I responded "That's what I thought", rolled up the window, did a nice four wheel burnout and tried to kick up as much dust as I could while driving off.