Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - Crag & Route Beta

Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
International	(General)	(General)	(General)

Topic Date User

Canada 18-May-2010 At 12:34:11 PM ajlowndes

Message

I just came back from living in Squamish for 18 months - it was, in a word, awesome.

Squamish is the little town (bit of a crackhead town but what small town doesn't have a problem like that) that is always in shade in the morning because of the MASSIVE 700M VERTICAL WALL OF SOLID GRANITE that overhangs the town. There is more climbing in that area than you can shake a stick at, seriously.

The gear is cheap, you (I) hardly ever have to go into Vancouver, and for skiing you have the recently upgraded Whistler just to the north, which of course just hosted the winter Olympics this February so that means new highway finished and plenty of spare housing around because they had to put all the athletes somewhere. And for the price of a ski pass you get to ski on not one, but TWO massive mountains with hundreds of kilometers of terrain to ski.

I found work while I was there putting up drywall (GIB-board) for a company in Squamish. Found myself travelling a lot to whistler for work (olympic buildup meant more buildings going up, so more drywall to put in, so more work for me, heh) which isn't bad because it's like 40mins drive and that's nothing in those parts, and I had a car. Plus a lot of the good climbing spots are along that highway - heaps of good sport routes in Cheakamus Canyon or if you want to get into REAL trad (which I highly recommend) you can try anything and everything in any other area that is around - that vertical wall I was talking about? it's called the Chief and has that name for a reason. After a while it's quite comforting to look up from whatever you are doing in your day to day life and see it peeking over the next building, watching over you and the rest of the town...

The climbing is a bit different to victoria, you will get good at crack climbing and slabs, and you'll find that cams are a bit more use than nuts, which surprised me when I came here because nuts seem to fit so much nicer into victorian rock than cams did, which I had been using for so long in squamish. You can get away with a squamish rack which consists of 10-12 cams and one (yes, just one) set of nuts, and quickdraws. Single 60m rope is also okay for most things there.

Bouldering? heaps

Trad climbing? HEAPS

Sport climbing? heaps, plenty to keep you busy for a month or so

Opportunity to develop your own routes? Heaps, but you will find that after 10 years your route will be overgrown again after no-one climbed it for so long because there is so much established/easier to access climbs to play on. I saw lots of overgrown routes on good rock back in the bush. Shame really because they are good routes on great rock.