Big Wash

12 boulder problems · clastic (Hunter Canyon Formation of the Mesaverde Group, with sandstone, shale) · 4,841 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

V0 to V3, with no single grade dominating.

3 V0
3 V1
3 V2
3 V3

Counted from the 12 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

Crag only 12

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

Hunter Canyon Formation of the Mesaverde Group (Hunter Canyon Formation) — clastic; sandstone; shale. Late Cretaceous, about 86 to 66 million years old.

Buff and gray medium- to coarse-grained massive cliff-forming sandstone and gray to greenish-gray shale. Thickness 375 to 1,400 ft.

This is the map unit under this crag's map point, read from the 1:100,000 sheet (Day and others, 1999, U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 99-0427). 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. Every crag on this unit: Hunter Canyon Formation of the Mesaverde Group. 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. 16 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1955 USGS sheet covering Big Wash — **USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Cameo, 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 1981: USGS topoView.

In print since 1877

1877 Geologic Map of Colorado (Hayden), high-resolution scan · F. V. Hayden; scan by the Colorado Geological Survey · 1877

The whole-state sheet of the 1877 atlas, scanned at full resolution by the state survey and free to download.

Colorado Geological Survey (publication HM-01-04) · Public domain · read it
Geological and geographical atlas of Colorado and portions of adjacent territory · F. V. Hayden, U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories · 1877

The first geology anyone drew of this ground. Hayden's survey mapped the state in the 1870s; these are the sheets, with the rock units coloured as they understood them then.

Internet Archive (Brigham Young University copy) · Public domain · read it

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

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.

Beavertail Mountain Tunnel west portal · Jeffrey Beall · 2025 · 1,438 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC BY · the record · placed by its coordinates

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