Deep Cut Guide

West Side

25 routes · Granitic rocks of 1400-m.y. age group · 8,485 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

5.6 to 5.12, mostly around 5.10.

  1. 1 5.6
  2. 2 5.7
  3. 2 5.8
  4. 2 5.9
  5. 8 5.10
  6. 8 5.11
  7. 2 5.12

Counted from the 25 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 25 

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 Hotness, Tons of Fun, Slopestyle (3 climbs, about 90 seconds) would place up to 22 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

Granitic rocks of 1400-m.y. age group (Silver Plume Granite, Sherman Granite, Cripple Creek Granite, St. Kevin Granite, Vernal Mesa Granite, Curecanti Granite, Eolus Granite, Trimble Granite) — alkali feldspar granite, granite, minor quartz monzonite. Mesoproterozoic, about 1,600 to 1,000 million years old.

Includes Silver Plume, Sherman, Cripple Creek, St. Kevin, Vernal Mesa, Curecanti, Eolus, and Trimble Granites or Quartz Monzonites; also, San Isabel Granite of Boyer (1962) and unnamed granitic rocks

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: Granitic rocks of 1400-m.y. age group. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1908

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1908. 24 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1908 USGS sheet covering West Side
USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Ignacio, CO 1908 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1908 · 1:125,000 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, 1908 to 1983: USGS topoView.

In print since 1877

Free to read: public domain or government work. About Durango 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.

Sheepherder near Durango, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1939
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.

Durango, Colorado. Residential district · 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.

Locomotives in roundhouse. Durango. 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.

Railroad yards. Durango, 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.

Residential district of Durango, 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.

Residential district of Durango, Colorado. Durango is trading, shipping and distribution center of southwestern 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.

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.

Weminuche Wilderness hills · Delaywaves · 2011 · 1,484 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC BY · the record · placed by its coordinates
Report this item

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
Wall direction not known yet.
Rain & forecast
0 mm of rain in the last 48 hours.
11-11 50°/38° · 0.0 mm · 9 mph · pm storms 0% 11-12 50°/39° · 0.0 mm · 6 mph · pm storms 0% 11-13 48°/33° · 0.0 mm · 8 mph · pm storms 2%
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 37.46485 N, 107.67834 W (West Side). That point can be off by hundreds of metres, so say so.

The map point for this crag is on land managed by San Juan National Forest (federal). It lies inside inventoried roadless area, national forest.

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.

Nobody has yet read San Juan National Forest'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
1,205 m away (map)
Mapped parking
385 m away (map)
Campsite
Transfer Park Campground, 287 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.