The Great Black North
25 routes · limestone · 7,108 ft
What's here
5.7 to 5.14, mostly around 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 Don't Eat Stuff on the Sidewalk, Chuana Chavaria, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) (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.
The guidebook for this area
Shelf Road Rock - Rick Thompson - 3rd ed. every crag it covers
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
One or more Ordovician fms (Fremont Limestone, Harding Sandstone, Manitou Limestone) — limestone, minor sandstone. Ordovician, about 483 to 451 million years old.
Fremont Limestone, Harding Sandstone, and Manitou Limestone
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. 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: One or more Ordovician fms. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.
On the map since 1894
The USGS has mapped this ground since 1894. 26 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.
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, 1894 to 1989: USGS topoView.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Routes
- 1 Don't Eat Stuff on the Sidewalk 5.11d
- 2 Laugh the Past Away 5.11c
- 3 It's All Gone 5.11a
- 4 [Redacted] 5.10d
- 5 Black Toe Arete 5.10a
- 6 Cold Feet 5.9
- 7 Don't Make Me Shave You 5.7
- 8 Delilah 5.10a
- 9 Three Doubles 5.11c
- 10 Torch & Twang 5.12a
- 11 Triage 5.13d
- 12 Tower of Power 5.12a
- 13 Chuana Chavaria 5.12a
- 14 Pincher 5.12b
- 15 Where Paradise Ain't So Crowded (aka "Reamer") 5.14a
- 16 Datura 5.11d
- 17 The Burnt Toast 5.11b
- 18 Tout Tout de Suite 5.12
- 19 Bete Noir 5.12
- 20 The Magus 5.13b
- 21 Capital Outlay 5.12c
- 22 Locutus 5.12c
- 23 The Borg 5.13a
- 24 Resistance is Futile 5.12a
- 25 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) 5.12-
Also within 3 km
- The North End867 m · 29 routes · 7,056 ft
- The North Gym1,649 m · 29 routes · 7,013 ft
- The Bank1,910 m · 345 routes and 24 boulder problems · 7,269 ft
- Cash Wall2,112 m · 15 routes · 6,986 ft
- The Vault2,200 m · 37 routes · 6,848 ft
- Cactus Cliff2,259 m · 157 routes · 6,939 ft
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.
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.
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
The map point for this crag is on land managed by Colorado State Land Board (state), in Colorado State Land Board State Land Board. It lies inside wild and scenic river.
The boundary is close. Land managed by Private comes within 250 m of this point, and the point is not the rock — the wall itself may be on the other side of the line. Check which before you rely on either one's rules.
Worth checking first. PAD-US records public access to this unit as “closed” (according to CNHP COMaP, 2016). That is about getting onto the unit at all, not about climbing, and we have not checked it against Colorado State Land Board's own page.
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 Colorado State Land Board'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
- Campsite
- Banks Campground, 2,659 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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