Deep Cut Guide

Cathedral Spires Bouldering

7 routes and 32 boulder problems · granite (Pikes Peak Granite) · 6,964 ft

Take me there Routes ↓ Directions

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

5.8 to 5.13, mostly around 5.12.

  1. 1 5.8
  2. 1 5.10
  3. 1 5.11
  4. 3 5.12
  5. 1 5.13

V0 to V11, with no single grade dominating.

  1. 1 V0
  2. 1 V1
  3. 3 V2
  4. 3 V3
  5. 5 V4
  6. 4 V5
  7. 3 V6
  8. 4 V7
  9. 3 V8
  10. 2 V9
  11. 2 V10
  12. 1 V11

Counted from the 39 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

Base placed (one source) 13  Position on wall known 19  Crag only 7 

The order of the climbs along this wall is known from the open catalogue, so a few surveys go a long way: standing at Product Placement Stand, Unicorn Mantel (2 climbs, about 60 seconds on Product Boulder) 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

Pikes Peak Granite. Mesoproterozoic, about 1,600 to 1,000 million years old.

White to orange-pink biotitic or biotite-hornblende granite, granodiorite, and quartz-monzonite. Weathers to disaggregated mass of constituent minerals (called grus). Age about 1.04 billion years (Hedge and others, 1967, p. 551).

This is the map unit under this crag's map point, read from the 1:100,000 sheet (Trimble and others, 2003, U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Investigations Series I-856-H). 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: Pikes Peak Granite. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1893

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1893. 33 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1893 USGS sheet covering Cathedral Spires Bouldering
USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Platte Canyon, CO 1893 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1893 · 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, 1893 to 1994: USGS topoView.

In print since 1877

Free to read: public domain or government work. About South Platte as a whole, not this wall. More in the reading room.

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.

Platte Canon, Colorado
Platte Canon, Colorado · Jackson, William Henry, 1843-1942 · 1899 · photochrom
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.

Threshing wheat near Sedgwick, Colo., South Platte Valley on Union Pacific · Stimson, Joseph Elam, 1870-1952 · 1900
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · found by place name, not yet checked
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

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.

Cathedral Spires, Garden of the Gods, 2009
Cathedral Spires, Garden of the Gods, 2009 · DimiTalen · 2009 · 729 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · the record · placed by its coordinates
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Routes

Also within 3 km

Straight line between the two crags' map points, each of which can be some way from its rock. For when this wall is full, or the sun has found it.

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
sun 07:30-08:00
Wall faces NE (USGS elevation). Shade from the surrounding terrain is counted.
Deep terrain: the skyline averages 23° above horizontal, so the sun has to climb well clear of the rim before it reaches this wall.
Crags by sun and shade →
Rain & forecast
0 mm of rain in the last 48 hours.
11-11 57°/32° · 0.0 mm · 10 mph · pm storms 0% 11-12 57°/36° · 0.0 mm · 7 mph · pm storms 0% 11-13 60°/37° · 0.0 mm · 7 mph · pm storms 0%
Open-Meteo, fetched 2026-11-11 18:41 UTC

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 39.41748 N, 105.26147 W (Cathedral Spires Bouldering). That point can be off by hundreds of metres, so say so.

We don't know who manages this ground: PAD-US doesn't map this point as protected land, which most often means it is private. Find out whose it is before you go.

Nobody has yet read the land manager's own rules for this crag and written them down here, so treat the above as where you are, not as what you may do.

Approach trail, from Jefferson County

Sunshine Trail in Cathedral Spires Park passes 298 m from this crag's map point. The county rates it most difficult. Pets: yes.

A segment the county flags as climber access, drawn on the Take me there map. Where it leaves the trail for the base of the wall is the guidebook's to say, not ours.

Nearby, from OpenStreetMap

Mapped parking
788 m away (map)

Distances are a straight line from this crag's map point, which can itself be hundreds of metres off; a road may be much longer. Mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), so a toilet missing here may simply be unmapped. Parking here is what OSM has drawn nearby, not a guidebook's directions.

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