Red Rock Canyon

Before heading out of Vegas, we decided to take advantage of world class climbing at Red Rock west of the Strip.

Our guide was a quirky, older man who played a big part in setting and naming routes at Red Rock. He chose a crazy multi-pitch route called Physical Graffiti. It He lead climbed to set the ropes as Dave belayed below. Once he was set, we followed up the wall as he belayed from above. The most terrifying moment was when he clipped us from an anchor 100 feet above as he continued up the mountain. My feet were on a ledge that was about 6 inches wide. He finally made it to the top where he secured the ropes and belayed us as we made our way up. The view from the top was amazing. We spent a few minutes enjoying it before he had us rappel back down to the ground. The climb was rated as a 5.6 but it felt much harder than that. Maybe it was the 290 feet up into the air that we climbed!

We didn’t have a ton of time left before the sun went down, so he chose a relatively a multi-pitch climb that we turned into a single pitch to end the day. Big Bad Wolf was rated as 5.9, but we only ended up doing half the climb and I think it was the easy half. I enjoyed this climb way better than the last monster that we tackled. I scrambled up to the second pitch in less than 5 minutes!

After our afternoon of climbing, we were rewarded with a peaceful walk out of Red Rock Canyon under a moonlight sky.Read more