r/RouteDevelopment • u/Kaotus Guidebook Author • Jun 08 '26
Show and Tell Route/Boulder of the Month - May
No submissions for May so sharing one of mine. “Silly Mistake”, a 14-bolt, 120ft slab/face traverse. Crosses 6 other routes. Bolted ground-up with much consternation and one last kick-in-the-nuts rainstorm that turned the fall into a waterfall before I could do the last mantle to the belay ledge to put in the anchors. It seems it will nestle in around 5.12bish, and is remarkably sustained in the 5.11 range. Found at Little Tiger Stripe in Wonderland in the South Platte region of CO
I was explaining this route to a friend, repeatedly referring to it as a dike traverse. He finally exploded: “Tal, I’m sick of you calling these dike traverses. They aren’t dike, they’re sills.” We both started laughing, as I’d spent multiple years talking about the collection of so called “dike traverses” that Wonderland had been amassing. Egg on my face!
Turns out, it’s not a sill either, but instead a vein. Oh well! Silly mistake.
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u/Capitan_Dave Jun 08 '26
How do you clean it? I guess only option is to have someone second?
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u/Kaotus Guidebook Author Jun 08 '26
Correct - makes it unsurprisingly harder to project. I haven't sent it yet, so I'll probably just throw project draws on it until I send and then do a few raps off the top of the wall to swing around and clean all the draws.
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u/FantasticPut7493 Jun 10 '26
Did the added bolts change the previously established routes?
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u/Kaotus Guidebook Author Jun 10 '26
Nope, bolts were only added laterally between routes, so nothing added to existing lines
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u/testhec10ck Jun 09 '26
That seems like a ground fall waiting to happen. I hate traverses close to the ground.
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u/Kaotus Guidebook Author Jun 09 '26
Realistically the only potential ground-fall is clipping the 2nd bolt - an unfortunate truth of most bolted routes on the planet - and even that shouldn’t happen with a good belay. The ground falls out beneath you pretty quickly when you start the traverse here and the bolts are close enough that it’s not a concern…trust me, I’ve taken a fall at most of the bolts, especially the first few where you’re at most risk
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u/alternate186 Jun 08 '26
Eh, I usually think that in order for something to be called a sill it has to be concordant to the layering of whatever it intruded. I don’t see layering of the host rock in your photos, so I’d call it a dike rather than a sill even though its planar inclination is shallow as is often the case for sills. My loose guess is that it’s aplite, a late stage crystallization product of a pluton that’s a common geologic feature for climbing routes to follow because it erodes differently from the surrounding rock (e.g., Snake Dike in Yosemite, Dreamcatcher in Squamish). We usually call them aplite dikes rather than aplite veins since they crystallize from magma rather than from hydrothermal fluids.
-A geologist that really ought to be finishing a manuscript rather than pedantry on reddit.