Bowman Valley Climbing — Oct 8-9, 2016
With Jamie and Yasmeen in town for the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, we were looking for a nice collection of moderate sport routes. Once we heard about climbing in Bowman Valley, the choice was simple. From what we read, it looked like an awesome weekend climbing destination.
On Friday evening, we picked up J & Yas at SFO. We drove to Rocklin where we had booked a hotel for the night. Saturday morning, we drove the rest of the way to Bowman Valley.
We started out with some easy 5.fun to 5.8 climbs at a wall called the Fun House taking turns leading and setting up anchors.
The temperature was ideal for climbing, sunny and cool in the morning and warm in the afternoon. There was not a single other group in the area for the first couple hours. We had the whole crag to ourselves!
We headed over the Candy Land for a few harder routes to finish off the day.
Tyler lead Rock n Rolla (5.9) which had great holds most of the way. After passing the roof it got real slabby and required a lot of smearing to reach the anchors.
After we finished climbing for the day we drove to our planned campsite on the opposite site of Bowman Lake. The road around the lake is pretty rough but the Forester handled like a champ. After a quick swim in the lake, we setup camp for the night.
The next day went to check out The Cove. The approach involves crossing a sturdy bridge over a fast moving water flume. The leftmost routes all involve reaching the first bolt above the water hazard so we opted for the first route with a dry landing.
The were also had some really interesting shorter bolted top-rope routes on some boulders near the wall. We spent some time on the boulders before Tyler wrapped up the day with a lead most of the way up Long Shot (5.10c)
We drove back to the city Sunday night and got Indian food for dinner, to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving.
We love having visitors! Come stay with us and we’ll go on a California adventure together.
