Eatonville Adventure

On Thursday Micah, Laura and I made the drive out to Eatonville to check out the crag there. I heard about it when Jim Yoder came and gave a talk at the WRG, him and Marlene Ford bolted it a few years ago. A couple of friends from Olympia had checked it out and said some good things about it, so we thought why not? It is about a 50 minutes drive from Olympia, so not exactly local, but it was a beautiful drive with great views of Mount Rainier. The directions were good, but after we parked we walked down the wrong trail, and ended up at a chossy cliff under a bridge. It was obvious we were not in the right place since it was nothing like what we had heard it described as. We searched around for a bit, Laura and Micah wanted to go home, but I could sense we were close. We headed down another path and found the cliff basking in the sun.

It was pretty much what I imagined, a short slabby basalt cliff with lots of bolts. Its about 30m long and 5m high, with 13 little routes packed in. The routes are about 3-5 bolts long which makes this cliff one of the most densely bolted pieces of rock I've ever climbed on. They looked like a lot of fun to climb though, so we got started. We started on the left and worked our way right, we got 9 routes over before we stopped cause the base of the furthest right routes were in the river. After much discussion we reached a consensus on the grades of the routes we did, they varied from 5.7 – 5.10b. Although the ones on the right that we didn’t do looked like they could be a little trickier. It was a pretty fun day for all of us, it was nice to get a bunch of routes done and trying all new stuff. This crag is definitely never going to be a huge destination by any stretch of the imagination, but its great for beginners since the bolting is so friendly and the grades are easy. I'd definitely recommend it to climbers in the South Sound area, who are looking for an chill day out in a great setting. I'm pretty sure I'll be back later this summer to finish off those last routes on the right when the river is lower, and when its warm enough to take a dip in the river too!