Viva Chattavegas by Percy Bishton include "header_root.php

Little Rock City
The next few days saw us sampling another local area called Little Rock City, a mere 20 minutes from Chattanooga. Please note that this area is currently closed to climbers, but the locals are trying hard to work out a new access agreement. Check what the situation is before you visit this area, and please do not climb here until an arrangement has been reached. If this area were lost to bouldering it would truly be a disaster. Scattered along the edge of a golf course on a mountain just outside town, Little Rock City is a boulderers paradise. Literally thousands of problems have been done here, on the pristine sandstone blocks. Many problems follow perfect lines up the boulders, with just enough holds on the perfectly smooth rock to allow the problems to be done. The purity of the classic lines such as Celestial Mechanics (V7), Tristar (V5) and the still unclimbed Barndoor 2000 (V?) just beg for you to get on them. There is enough here to keep the best boulderers going for months, if not years. It took us three days just to see all the boulders, let alone climb them all. Classics such as Slap Happy (V4/5), Blindspot (V8), or the bizarre dyno of Castaway (V9) should ensure that you will always leave with something to come back to!

Horse Pens 40
Horse Pens 40 is in Alabama, about a one and a half hour drive from Chattanooga, and is on private land. However, local climbers approached the landowners last summer, and suggested that he might let them loose on the boulders. The landowner jumped at the chance, and now the area has car parking, camping with showers, a café, shop and so on. Boulderers have to pay 3 dollars a day to climb here, although I would happily have paid more when I saw the boulders. If God had tried to make the perfect bouldering area, he would have been hard pressed to beat this place. Endless boulders of bullet hard sandstone, which has had amazing features worn into it by the action of flowing water, perched on flat, soft, sandy landings. Problems of all standards abound, with every conceivable angle of rock and type of hold. The speciality of Horse Pens is its water grooves. These great looking features were just made to be climbed, and almost always look innocuous from the floor. However, be prepared for a surprise, as these features rarely have a single good hold on them. Boulderers end up resorting to many weird techniques to get them up these classics, usually involving very powerful and shouldery presses and squeezes, whilst trying to stand on nothing much at all! The sandstone here has superb friction, and cool conditions are useful for many of the harder problems. However, the months from fall to spring give plenty of days where the temperature rarely gets above freezing with perfect blue skies. We visited in mid-April, and got a cold snap where the nighttime temperature was below freezing, and the day time temperature was about 15 degrees, ideal conditions for bouldering. Classic problems, and classic projects are to be found all over this extensive area - again it took us three days just to see all the boulders.

All the areas in this article have some of the best, unclimbed bouldering lines I have ever seen, but there are always one or two which really stand out. The best example of this is at Horse Pens 40. As you approach the first boulders from the car park (a long walk of at least 20 seconds) look at the hanging steep scoop facing the classic V3 watergroove, Twix Lips. This line just begs to be climbed - a completely smooth overhanging scoop about 8 feet off the deck with not a hold on it except for the perfect finger sized offset seam running up its entire length. This must be what V13 lay-backing is all about! Other outstanding problems here include Genesis (V2), Millipede (V6), Easier said than done (V5), God Module (V10), Twix Lips (V3), Hugs and Kisses (V8), Great Dane (V10), Slider (V9), Great White (V7)…….the list goes on and on! The rock here is probably more like Fontainebleau than any other bouldering venue in the US, but unlike Fontainebleau the weather is good, food and gas are cheap, the locals are very friendly and will go out of their way to show you the classic problems, and everybody speaks English (well, more or less! The southern accents can sometimes be confusing, but always amusing)!

The end of our trip was fast approaching, and we re-visited Rocktown with a posse of locals to get the full guided tour. The rate of development of new problems has been intense in the last few years, and with so much rock around, it looks set to stay this way for many years to come. Once again, we were blown away by how much more there is to do here. I must have spent a couple of hours just being shown a load of awesome looking boulders that we had missed on our first visit, and then proceeded to run about frantically, trying to do everything, and spectacularly failing on most of the stuff I tried! (My excuse is, the bouldering was so good that I couldn't bring myself to have a rest day. Bouldering ten days in a row is not very good for ones performance - not that I cared, I was having too much fun!) A list of classic stuff to do at Rocktown would fill a couple of pages, but personal favourites were The Scoop (V3), Campus Punks (V5), The Orb (V8), Sundial (V7?!), Digital Scales (V9), The Comet (V8), Paparazzi (V7), everything on the Croc Block, Inspired by an Idiot (V5), the list is endless. Many of Rocktown's boulders are covered in beautiful holds and features, which make the area a Mecca for climbers looking for easier problems and more moderate circuits. However, if hard lines are your scene, this is a good place to trash yourself on some of the classics.