Boulder or Salt Lake City?

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Prod

Trad climber

Jan 31, 2011 - 12:00am PT

Spider, how long do you have to drive to get to crags in LA? I thought it was hours?

My vote is Vegas.

Prod.

Brian in SLC

Social climber

Salt Lake City, UT

Jan 31, 2011 - 12:54am PT

Boulder, no question.

Please tell all your friends.

Thanks.

valygrl

climber

Boulder, CO

Jan 31, 2011 - 01:31am PT

Define "town"

Patrick Oliver

Boulder climber

Fruita, Colorado

Jan 31, 2011 - 02:30am PT

Jim, you start with a comparison between Salt Lake and Boulder? Are
you asking about the town itself, or the location for the quality of
climbing? As for climbing, Boulder is about the best place to climb
on the planet. There are plenty of other great places, of course,
Yosemite, the Gunks, and... Salt Lake, but the climbing in Salt Lake
is very limited compared to how much there is around Boulder. I could
go into a long essay on the variety of climbing around Boulder and its
quality...

Todd Eastman

climber

Bellingham, WA

Jan 31, 2011 - 02:38am PT

Boulder has great after work climbing of all types minutes from downtown and scads of climbers to pester you into getting out. Damn Jim, maybe there's an appropriate climber theme type retirement community waiting for you...

in perhaps 30 years!

landcruiserbob

Trad climber

BIG ISLAND or Vail ; just following the sun.......

Jan 31, 2011 - 02:48am PT

St George or Moab.

The inversion in SLC sucks as does the Front range freakage going on in Boulder. Boulder is the EPO & growth hormone capital of the world & SLC has meth and.....

be well

rg

Wayno

Big Wall climber

Seattle, WA

Jan 31, 2011 - 02:52am PT

The best climbing town is the one having the most fun.

mcreel

climber

Barcelona

Jan 31, 2011 - 03:45am PT

Akron, Ohio is pretty close to Whipp's Ledges, so it should be on the list, certainly above Boulder. Someone mentioned B'ham. Come on, all of that kudzu makes approaches a bitch, and the chiggers will eat your private parts.

bhilden

Trad climber

Mountain View, CA

Jan 31, 2011 - 04:36am PT

People in Boulder just need to learn to not take themselves so seriously. Yeah, it's a nice place to live, but there are other places to live that are just as nice or nicer. It's not about where you live, but rather who you are.

Bruce

eurotrash

climber

Denmark

Jan 31, 2011 - 08:17am PT

What about Sacramento? Hard to climb after work but the weekend options are tough to beat...Tahoe, Yosemite, East Side, Shasta.

utahman912

Social climber

SLC, UT

Jan 31, 2011 - 09:35am PT

slc is just wrong on so many levels. for one thing, most climbers still wear spandex... and that gets increasingly problematic as they hit their 50s and 60s.

philo

Trad climber

Somewhere halfway over the rainbow

Jan 31, 2011 - 09:57am PT

All these Boulder slaggers must be the climbers who don't look good prancing around Eldo in lycra spandex. I for one look hot in tights.

Malcolm should post up his account of doing 20+ sports in a day in and around Boulder. Truly remarkable story. Only in Boulder.

Jaybro

Social climber

Wolf City, Wyoming

Jan 31, 2011 - 10:03am PT

Hard to beat the Salt Flats for Off-Piste rollerblading.

on the other hand Boulder is closer to the greater Medicine bow climbing mecca...

ddriver

Trad climber

SLC, UT

Jan 31, 2011 - 10:22am PT

And then there is that nasty ocean - all warm and blue with palm trees swaying in the breeze.

You've obviously never actually gotten IN it.

maldaly

Trad climber

Boulder, CO

Jan 31, 2011 - 11:27am PT

At Philo's request, here's the story form Will and my 17 sport day:. Sorry in advance for the weird formatting.

MultiSport Day
In the spring of 1997 Will Gadd and I were discussing the relative merits of living in Boulder vs. Canmore, AB. See, Will is a Canadian and the call of the wild north was pretty loud in his head. He’d already been in Boulder for 3 years! Our discussion soon got around to the variety of sports available in the immediate area and the quality of life that those sports imbued on the residents thereof. Yeah, I know, it sounds like we had been sampling some of the medical marijuana Boulder is famous for, but the discussion predated the MM phenomena by more than a decade. It was more likely that we had gotten into some medical margaritas. Whatever—in no time we had decided to try to do as many of them as we could in one day.
The first thing we had to do was put some boundaries around our day and some rules around what is and isn’t a sport. Here’s what we came up with.
1. First we eliminated ball sports because anything that uses a ball or a ball surrogate is, in reality, just a game.
2. Second, we had to figure where one sport ended and the other began. Many sports are micro-sliced and trying to decide where one sports ends and the other begins took careful consideration. We eventually came up with a 2-step qualification.
a. First, there had to be a group of people who participate in the chosen sport to the exclusion of the boundary sports. Are there people who mountain bike but not road bike? Bingo: two sports.
b. Second, the sports had to have footwear or foot gear that was designed specifically for that sport. Trail running shoes vs. road running shoes? Bingo again: two sports.
3. We decided that to be honest we both had to be proficient, if not good, in each sport. In the spirit of keeping it real, we each had to own the equipment necessary to participate in the sport and bring it with us during our day. No borrowing or swapping allowed.
4. Our day had to be self-supported and in a single vehicle. No re-loading the car or wussy sag wagons or media allowed. We would be on our own in Boulder Canyon. Except for a stop for burritos at Illegal Pete’s.
5. Twelve hours only. 7:00 am to 7:00 pm was it. We met up, loaded the car and caffeinated at Vic’s
6. And finally, each sport had to consist of at least one logical interval. For instance to qualify for Alpine Skiing we had to complete one run. Each climbing category had to consist of one route, etc.

There you have it: a framework for a great day of insanity. We chose April 13, 1997 because both winter and summer existed in the canyon and the lifts at Eldora were still open. Here are the sports we did in the approximate order in which we did them: Ice Climbing, Snowboarding, Alpine Sking, Tele Sking, Classic Sking, Skate Sking, Snowshoeing, Rappelling, Trad Climbing, Sport Climbing, Bouldering, Trail Running, Road Running, Mountain Biking, Road Biking, Rollerblading and Kayaking.
Will ended up moving to Canmore and I lost a leg, so the funhog potential in Boulder took a turn for the worse. Regardless, we still talk about that day whenever we get together and dream about doing it again. We’re trying to figure out if we can up the ante to 20 sports. Anyone have Rollerblades any more?

maldaly

Trad climber

Boulder, CO

Jan 31, 2011 - 11:29am PT

BTW, you could probably pull this off in SLC as well. Tahoe would be tough because of available ice. Can anyone thing of another locale where you could do it? Chamonix maybe.

donini

Trad climber

Ouray, Colorado

Topic Author's Reply - Jan 31, 2011 - 11:32am PT

Mal, the last rollerblades were put in a time capsule last year that wont be opened until 2110.
Great story!

edit: Why don't you post something on "Gimps on Ice."