We set out for the sport climbing paradise of New Jack City with four guides and four participants. I was driving, Adam was in the passenger seat blasting tunes, and everyone else was asleep. My favorite part of the drive was near the end – after about an hour and forty five minutes in, we broke out of a drizzling rainstorm into the clear high desert sun that we’d be climbing under for the rest of the weekend.
We pulled onto the short gravel road that marks the entrance to New Jack at about 9:45. The van was parked, packs were grabbed, and we set off for the Boy Scout Wall, a rock formation with some good warm-up routes. About 200 meters later, we were there. One of the remarkable things about New Jack is the sheer density of the climbing – the entire main area which holds most of the several hundred routes in New Jack is reachable by easy, five-to-ten minutes approaches. This makes it a fantastic area to climb with a group – Our guides were usually already leading climbs at the next area to set up topropes while the group was still getting packed up at the last spot.
We climbed well into the mid-afternoon on Saturday, with most of our participants getting to do all of the six routes that we set up at the Boy Scout and Sunnyside walls. We ended up camping in the site next to where two guys we met earlier, Anthony and Mike, were camping that night, and they proved to be perfect examples of the archetypal climber dudes – friendly, easygoing, and super psyched to be out climbing. They hung out around our bonfire with us, swapping stories and goofing around with some nighttime bouldering on the overhanging boulder next to our firepit. We also had another visitor to our campsite that night – the participant who had slept past his alarm had, through some miracle, found a friend to drive him the two hours from LA to the middle of the desert and drop him off so that he could camp with us that night and climb the next day! Happy to have another group member, we modified the sleeping arrangements accordingly and settled in for the night, staring at a sky full of constellations and even a few shooting stars.
A long exposure of camp
Sunday morning was cold and clear. Breakfast, packing, and planning all went by in a blur, and we set out for more rock climbing. This time around, we put up some harder, more interesting routes – quite a few 5.10a’s, and a solid mix of high-quality .8′s and .9′s. The participants did an awesome job with the harder stuff we were throwing at them, and everyone had a blast. As our last route of the day, I put up “Crooked Dick Spire“, a funky 5.9 up a thin and striking finger of rock. At the top of the spire, you could sit on a small knob of rock and look out over the entire valley and the sun hanging low over the rim. It was the perfect capstone to an awesome weekend of rock climbing.
The view of "Crooked Dick Spire" from below