Ponderosa Trail (SOUTH)

17 boulder problems · granite (Silver Plume-type quartz monzonite) · 7,643 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

VB to V8, mostly around V1.

1 VB
3 V0
5 V1
1 V2
3 V3
3 V4
1 V8

Counted from the 17 climbs here that carry a grade. Shown only where there are at least 5 of them — below that the shape is noise.

How well located

Position on wall known 10 Crag only 7

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

The order of the climbs along this wall is known from the open catalogue, so a few surveys go a long way: standing at Nerd Burglar, Before Me (2 climbs, about 60 seconds on Keep, The) would place up to 3 more climbs between them. Survey the wall →

“Up to” because the estimate between two surveyed routes is only used when they turn out to be close enough together on the ground.

Rock, from the geologic map

Biotite gneiss. Paleoproterozoic, about 2,500 to 1,600 million years old.

Gray, medium-grained, equigranular, well-foliated gneiss typically containing approximately 25–50 percent quartz, 20–30 percent plagioclase (approximately An30), 0–30 percent microcline, 10–15 percent biotite, 0–15 percent muscovite, 0–10 percent sillimanite, 0–5 percent hornblende, 1–2 percent opaque minerals, and a trace zircon. Most outcrops contain 5–20 percent granitic layers (leucosomes). Sillimanite, where abundant, occurs in fibrous, elongate, light-colored aggregates or clots as wide as about 1 cm. Migmatitic biotite gneiss in Clear Creek gave preliminary U-Pb zircon date on nonmelt phase of 1,773±18 Ma; near Pine, just south of map area, similar rock gave U-Pb zircon date of 1,780±9 Ma (W.R. Premo, unpub. data, 2005)

This is the map unit under this crag's map point, read from the 1:100,000 sheet (Kellogg and others, 2008, USGS Geologic Investigations Series 3000). 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 100 m wide on the ground, so the wall itself may be the neighbouring unit. The rock named at the top of this page comes from the public geology of this area; this card is the map's answer. Every crag on this unit: Biotite gneiss. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1899

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1899. 21 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1899 USGS sheet covering Ponderosa Trail (SOUTH) — **USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for West Denver, CO 1899** · U.S. Geological Survey · 1899 · 1:125,000 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, 1899 to 1983: USGS topoView.

Photographs near this crag

Taken within 1.5 km of this crag's map point and published under a licence that lets us show them, from Wikimedia Commons. The coordinates say where the camera was, not what it was pointed at, so some of these will be the creek or the trail rather than the rock.

Hidden Fawn Trial 2016-07-12 940 · Chris Light · 2016 · 694 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA · the record · placed by its coordinates

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