I headed way, way up north this weekend with Eric Johnson to hang out at his cabin, and most importantly, check out the Vermillion River Gorge boulder.
There was still a lot of snow out there — but most of the 5 minute approach is along a well packed snowmobile trail, leaving just the final 100 feet of post-holing past our knees to get to the boulder. Fortunately, the sun was shining, and with temps topping out around 30 — it felt pretty good when the wind wasn’t blowing too hard.
We started by clearing out a bunch of brush around the boulder which should open up the possibility of a few more lines on the boulder. After this we began by goofing around on the most obvious warm up line on the boulder – which was actually pretty fun and pretty tall:
After this we started trying a line I was very excited to get on: A River Runs Through It — first done by Nic Oklobzija last March and given solid V7 for a grade. The line starts on an obvious jug and an ok foot with a big move to another jug. It then sets off and left into a series of small crimps which will eventually gain a left hand sloper. From this tenuous hold — you must stab a small right hand crimp and from there get the lip. To make it interesting — the landing is pretty awkward with a sort of pit between a smaller detached boulder and the boulder itself that you can fall into. Ideally when you fall off the upper moves you land on top of the smaller detached boulder.
The start and middle moves up to the sloper – although a bit tenuous and kind of scary, weren’t too bad – especially with my reach. The crux of the problem, however, was getting through that sloper. It’s bad enough that it’s quite hard to really pull on and you really gotta use some not-too-great feet as much as possible to stab the next crimp. I was able to sort of stick the move once after about 15 tries but took a scary fall a split second later off the edge of the detached boulder and down the 7 feet into the snow. Here’s a couple photos Eric Johnson took of Nic last spring showing the ending moves:
Unfortunately, while working the crux, the crimp undercling broke and became about half the size it was before. I know the problem will still go – but think that it will add significant difficulty to getting into the undercling and will perhaps add a grade to V8 – but we will see when it gets repeated. A River Runs Through It is a great problem and it is firmly entrenched in my head now as something I’ve got to get back up to and do..
nic: 
brian camp: 
Ben nestrud: