Deep Cut Guide

D-Shacks Cliffband

1 route and 22 boulder problems · Dakota Sandstone and Burro Canyon Formation · 4,842 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

V1 to V7, with no single grade dominating.

  1. 4 V1
  2. 6 V2
  3. 3 V3
  4. 3 V4
  5. 3 V5
  6. 2 V6
  7. 1 V7

Counted from the 22 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) 1  Position on wall known 20  Crag only 2 

The order of the climbs along this wall is known from the open catalogue, so a few surveys go a long way: standing at Thin Smile, Ben's Dyno, Pinball (3 climbs, about 90 seconds on Dynamite Cliff Band) would place up to 14 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

Dakota Sandstone and Burro Canyon Formation (Dakota Sandstone, Burro Canyon Formation) — sedimentary; clastic; sandstone; carbonaceous sand, shale, coal beds, and chert-pebble conglomerate. Early Cretaceous, about 125 to 100 million years old.

Dakota Sandstone: yellowish-brown and gray friable to quartzitic sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone and interbedded gray to black carbonaceous shale. Contains a few thin very lenticular coal beds. Plant impressions commoon; basal conglomerate is locally present. Thickness 100-200 ft. Burro Canyon Formation: white, gray, and buff fine- to coarse-grained sandstone interbedded with green and purplish siltstone, shale, and mudstone, and thin beds of impure limestone. Sandstone is locally conglomeratic, particularly at base. Thickness a few feet to 125 feet.

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: Dakota Sandstone and Burro Canyon Formation. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1956

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1956. 14 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1956 USGS sheet covering D-Shacks Cliffband
USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Grand Junction, CO 1956 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1956 · 1:250,000 sheet
USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection · Public domain · the record · placed by its coordinates
Report this item

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, 1956 to 1981: USGS topoView.

In print since 1877

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

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 07:30-16:30
Wall faces S (USGS elevation). Shade from the surrounding terrain is counted.
Partly enclosed: the skyline averages 14° above horizontal.
Rain & forecast
0 mm of rain in the last 48 hours.
11-11 62°/34° · 0.0 mm · 9 mph · pm storms 0% 11-12 63°/40° · 0.0 mm · 6 mph · pm storms 0% 11-13 60°/42° · 0.0 mm · 6 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 39.05029 N, 108.60836 W (D-Shacks Cliffband). 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.

Nearby, from OpenStreetMap

Toilets
282 m away (map)
Mapped parking
263 m away (map)
Campsite
The Camp, 2,578 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.

Keep Deep Cut Guide free

No ads, no paywall, no account. You can chip in directly to help keep it running.