The Dark Side

106 boulder problems · sandstone (Fountain Formation) · 5,971 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

V0 to V10, mostly around V1.

13 V0
21 V1
14 V2
15 V3
14 V4
10 V5
6 V6
3 V7
4 V8
2 V9
3 V10

Counted from the 105 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 82 Crag only 23

The order of the climbs along this wall is known from the open catalogue, so a few surveys go a long way: standing at Triangle Slab, Tree Slab Dyno, Evian (3 climbs, about 90 seconds on Squirming Coil Area) would place up to 12 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.

The guidebook for this area

Colorado Bouldering: Front Range - Phillip Benningfield, Matt Samet - 2020 every crag it covers

From the publisher Bookshop.org

Bookshop.org links are affiliate links: if you buy through one we earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop.org gives its profits to independent bookshops.

The book has the topos, the descriptions and the local knowledge this page can't. Buying it helps support the people who know the crag best.

Rock, from the geologic map

Dakota Group. Cretaceous, about 122 to 97 million years old.

Consists of an upper interbedded sandstone and shale unit (the South Platte Formation) about 61 to 91 m thick, and a lower conglomeratic sandstone formation (the Lytle Formation) about 12 to 24 m thick. Forms the most prominent hogback ridge along the mountain front, the so-called “Dakota hogback.” The South Platte Formation contains refractory clay.

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: Dakota Group. 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. 25 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1899 USGS sheet covering The Dark Side — **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.

Denver Mountain Parks (Unsplash) · Natasha Miller tashography · 2015 · 1,249 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · the record · placed by its coordinates

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