16 Candles is a wild route that starts out a bit hard and wide in a corner and then transitions to a steep, splitter, thin hands/fingers crack. If you kept right in the wide crack you could keep going up the corner to the top of the cliff but doing so would require an indecent number of 4s and 5s. Hint: before stepping left on the face reach inside the wide crack for hidden finger locks.

16 Candles

Blood Red Dolores

Z Funk

Tower Two

Heat Pump

Tower One

Thumbs Up Tower

Heat Sink

This needs some cleaning. It is not as classy as

Heat Pump

, which shares the anchor. It is good #6 practice, though.

This climb is on the far right cliff band just behind the Towers. Climb up the acute, bigger-than-fists dihedral/slot into immaculate tight fists and hand crack all the way to the anchor! Edges and holds ease the grade of the climb, although the first 15 feet are a bit burly and blank (I couldn't fist jam this). Have fun. This thing is an awesome addition to a tower day if you climb the grade.

Z Funk has more wide climbing! It starts out with nice hands and then gets startlingly wide under the ear and over the top of it. Fortunately it backs off again at the top.

Locate the largest tower in the area (GPS coordinates 38.1383, -108.8753), and begin on the northeast side of the tower. Climb up easy slab to a face with two bolts (crux). Once past the bolts, motor up more slab (possible mid-sized cam but not necessary) to the anchor.

Heat Pump starts out with fingers to 0.75 to a nice ledge, then it goes full agro into a slot topped with a section of vertical offwidth. It is well worth bringing your big gear to get your pump on for this one.

This is the centermost tower of the trio. The book states this climb as 4th Class, but upon solo’ing, the summit moves seemed a bit committing and felt more like lower to mid-5th Class to me. There is a bolted anchor on top with a rap to the NW. We climbed up the NE side or opposite the side seen from the road. Take a chossy, wide chimney slot up or a more secure Wingate slot up to the bench that guards the summit. There are two sport routes on this section which would be P1 of 2 for this tower.

This ascends a remote tower with no crowds yet!

Description

Location

Protection

Routes in Towers above The BLM Campground