Deep Cut Guide

Lake's Boneyard

1 boulder problem · shale (Mancos Shale, with sandstone) · 6,562 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

How well located

Crag only 1 

No route here has its own point yet. The map pin is the crag. At the wall? Survey it: 30 seconds per route.

Rock, from the geologic map

Mancos Shale — shale, sandstone. Late Cretaceous, about 91 to 75 million years old.

In northwest and west-central: Intertongues complexly with units of overlying Mesaverde Group or Fm; lower part consists of a calcareous Niobrara equivalent and Frontier Sandstone and Mowry Shale Members; in areas where the Frontier and Mowry Members (Kmfm), or these and the Dakota Sandstone (Kfd) are distinguished, map unit (Km) consists of shale above Frontier Member. In Southwest: Lower part contains Juana Lopez Member (Kmj)

This is the map unit under this crag's map point, read from the 1:500,000 sheet (Horton and others, 2017, U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 1052). The point can be a few hundred metres from the rock, a cliff often stands on the line between two units, and at that scale a line on the map is about 500 m wide on the ground, so the wall itself may be the neighbouring unit. Every crag on this unit: Mancos Shale. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1955

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1955. 14 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1955 USGS sheet covering Lake's Boneyard
USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Red Rock Canyon, CO 1955 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1955 · 1:24,000 sheet
USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection · Public domain · the record · placed by its coordinates
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Public domain, U.S. Geological Survey. The sheet shows the ground as the survey found it then, which is why a trail or road you know may be missing. Every sheet over this point, 1955 to 1983: USGS topoView.

From the archives

Photographs of this area held by the Library of Congress, oldest first. Every one carries the Library's own "no known restrictions on publication"; anything else is left out.

Main Street, Montrose, Colo. · Luchsinger, J. · 1910 · postcard
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Main street, Montrose, Colorado · Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985 · 1939
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Newsboy on main street, Montrose, Colorado · Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985 · 1939
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Restaurant sign, Montrose, Colorado · Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985 · 1939
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Watching World Series scoreboard, Montrose, Colorado · Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985 · 1939
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Farm. Montrose County, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1940
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Irrigated farm. Montrose County, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1940
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Irrigation ditch leading to farm, Montrose · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1940
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Main street. Montrose, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1940
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
Report this item

Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Main street. Montrose, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1940
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
Report this item

Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

5 more at the Library of Congress.

Routes

Photos from climbers

No photos here yet. If you're at the crag, yours would be the first.

Pick a photo from your camera roll rather than taking one here: a picture taken inside a browser usually has no location saved in it, and we check that the photo was taken at this crag before publishing it. Photos of guidebook pages and topos are refused — they're the author's work. By sending one you're letting us publish it.

Nobody reviews these before they appear, so anyone can report one and it's hidden straight away — including you, if you change your mind, and including a photographer who finds their own picture here.

Taken at the crag by climbers and published as they sent them. Each one's own location had to be within 0.5 km of this crag before we accepted it. See something that shouldn't be here? Use Report this photo under it and it's hidden at once. Anything else, write to us.

Sun today
Wall direction not known yet.
Rain & forecast
No recent weather for this crag.

Conditions reported

Nothing reported recently.

Report what you see

Reports are dated and fade on their own: wet rock after 3 days, a bad bolt after a year. No names, no text.

Access & safety

Emergency: call 911. Read out your location: Works without signal. If GPS fails, this crag's approximate map point is 38.56660 N, 107.79772 W (Lake's Boneyard). That point can be off by hundreds of metres, so say so.

The map point for this crag is on land managed by Bureau of Land Management (federal), in Uncompahgre Field Office.

The boundary is close. Land managed by National Park Service comes within 250 m of this point, and the point is not the rock — the wall itself may be on the other side of the line. Check which before you rely on either one's rules.

Land manager from USGS PAD-US (public domain), read 2026-09-29. It is the manager of the crag's map point, which can be a long way from the wall. What you may do on the rock is the manager's to say, not ours.

Rules for all Bureau of Land Management land

Fees
Developed campgrounds are fee sites: at Shelf Road, Sand Gulch is $20 a night for an individual site and $40 for a group site, with no drinking water, hook-ups or trash service. Where a fee area is posted, you must register and pay within 30 minutes of entering it.
Overnight
Camping more than 14 days in any 30-day period at any one location is prohibited, including in a campground, and afterwards you must move at least 30 air miles. Personal property may not be left unattended anywhere on public land for more than 48 hours.

Read on Bureau of Land Management's own pages, checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. What they require, in full, or their own climbing page. These apply to the manager's whole holding; anything specific to this crag is above.

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