Deep Cut Guide

Riggs' Hill West

1 route and 19 boulder problems · clastic (Brushy Basin Shale Member of the Morrison Formation, with shale, siltstone) · 4,889 ft

Take me there Routes ↓ Directions

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

What's here

VB to V4, but over half of these boulder problems are V0.

  1. 2 VB
  2. 10 V0
  3. 2 V1
  4. 3 V2
  5. 1 V3
  6. 1 V4

Counted from the 19 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) 3  Position on wall known 15  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 Left Face, Magi Arete (2 climbs, about 60 seconds on Magi Face) would place up to 4 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

Brushy Basin Shale Member of the Morrison Formation (Brushy Basin Shale Member) — clastic; shale; siltstone. Late Jurassic, about 153 to 145 million years old.

Gray, pale-green, red, and light-purple mudstone and siltstone, a few lenses of gray sandstone, limestone, and conglomerate. Thickness 200-300 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: Brushy Basin Shale Member of the Morrison Formation. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1934

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1934. 17 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1934 USGS sheet covering Riggs' Hill West
USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Colorado National Monument, CO 1934 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1934 · 1:24,000 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, 1934 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 07:30-16:10
Wall faces S (USGS elevation). Shade from the surrounding terrain is counted.
Open sky in most directions.
Crags by sun and shade →
Rain & forecast
0 mm of rain in the last 48 hours.
11-11 62°/32° · 0.0 mm · 9 mph · pm storms 0% 11-12 63°/38° · 0.0 mm · 5 mph · pm storms 0% 11-13 60°/41° · 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 39.07400 N, 108.65120 W (Riggs' Hill West). 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

Mapped parking
228 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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