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ARTICLE: The Painted Wall

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 UKC Articles 17 Dec 2019
Luke Mehall writes about climbing the Southern ArĂȘte on the magnificent Painted Wall of the Black Canyon in Gunnison National Park, the tallest cliff in Colorado.

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 MischaHY 18 Dec 2019
In reply to UKC Articles:

Great writing. My most important rule for long walls (after getting benighted in Verdon) - always always always headtorch!  

With a decent torch, the day just keeps going and going. 

 Brown 18 Dec 2019
In reply to UKC Articles:

Its good to be taken back to The Black by some epic stories.

I'd definitely recommend the place. Its somewhere I feel I have unfinished business I will never get finished.

 McHeath 18 Dec 2019
In reply to UKC Articles:

Great article, thanks for this!

This famous account by Pat Ament of a Black Canyon fiasco (aged 16) with Layton Kor is also well worth (re-)reading:

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/2125653/the-Black-Canyon-with-Kor-b...

Luke Mehall 18 Dec 2019
In reply to McHeath:

Thanks for the kind words. Funny, Pat Ament just wrote a piece about his adventures with Chuck Pratt for Volume 17 of our zine. Available in print now, and eventually will be online for free. 

https://climbingzine.com/

 dominic o 19 Dec 2019
In reply to UKC Articles:

Brought back great memories from our own ascent of The Scenic Cruise this summer 

https://rockaroundtheworld.co.uk/2019/08/29/the-scenic-cruise/

Can't believe how few Brits seem to have discovered the magic of The Black! 

 WestslopeColo 20 Dec 2019
In reply to UKC Articles:

I’ll never forget my first Black Canyon (and unplanned bivy). It was a short route, but in the pre guide book days we got throughly lost!  Luke was waiting for us on the rim when we emerged.  I’ve been back many times, but that first scrappy climb always set the tone!

In reply to UKC Articles:

Terrific article.  Where was the photo looking down the river to the Painted Wall taken from?  I'll be visiting next September - just as part of a road trip round Colorado and New Mexico, my days of vertical ambitions are long since gone - and I'd love to have the chance of catching a similar shot.

As for the surprisingly low number of Brits that seem to know about the Black Canyon, well  I've often thought that the western USA does physical geography like the UK does history; there's just too much of it to get to know it all.  Within an hour's drive of where I am, and without thinking too much about it, there are at least three medieval castles, two cathedrals of similar age (maybe another one as well), a large number of stone circles  and earthworks of about 4,000 - 5,00 years old, ruined abbeys, Roman roads, the list goes on and on; so much so that something so old that it might be celebrated as a national treasure in the USA is here just part of the background noise.  The western US is the same but with hills, mountains, rivers, gorges, volcanoes and more and something that we consider a major geographical feature in Britain would, in the USA, be so trivial as not even to have a name. 

So the average Brit would have to look closely to find the Black Canyon.  That's perhaps not a bad thing, but I'm sure you'll have raised the profile of it considerably with this article and a good many people might be having a web search to find out a bit more once they've put away the Christmas celebrations.  

T.

 Andy Donson 21 Dec 2019
In reply to Pursued by a bear:

It’s taken from one of the overlooks on the more civilized south rim I think. The wall at the end of the canyon in the photo is actually Hooker Buttress (and the large steep wall to the right is north chasm view - scenic cruise etc). The Painted Wall is out of sight further down canyon (the river takes a left) and there are some overlooks on the south rim that provide a spectacular view of it.


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