So I’ll start off by admitting that this TR is a year late. Yes, that is an incredible amount of procrastination. I debated skipping the write-up entirely, but we just completed (and I just posted) Bros Trip V, so I thought I needed to go back and do this one right.

After three years in a row in CA, my brother Geoff and I decided to venture a little further for our annual climbing trip. We’ve both been to Red Rocks many times and love it, though we’ve rarely been there together. And despite having climbed there a lot, there are still many, many climbs on our hit list.

We decided to kick things off with Crimson Chrysalis. Knowing its notorious reputation for crowds and its congestion-inducing descent (rapping the climbing route), we decided we really needed to be first on the rock. So we were waiting at the park gate a few minutes before opening and chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, two cars had arrived just before us. Unbelievably, one pulled off early and the other was going really slow so we passed on a straight-away. We pulled into the Pine Creek parking area, threw on our packs and hustled off for Cloud Tower. We hiked in at a fairly blistering pace, eager to get on the route. As we pushed up the final stretch to the wall, about to celebrate having it all to ourselves, we ran into two guys roping up at the base. Dumbfounded, we asked how the hell they had gotten there first. Apparently, they drove in from AZ the night before, packing a BMX bike (complete w/pegs!) in their trunk. They rode the bike, together, with all their climbing gear, backwards up the loop road and then cross-countried to the base of the route. Impressed with their ingenuity, our frustration subsided. After that effort, clearly they deserved to go first.


The next day we drove into Black Velvet Canyon and climbed Dream of Wild Turkeys, a route we selected after seeing it on Beckey’s list of his 100 favorite climbs in North America. It lived up to the hype.


The last day we decided to hit Frigid Air Buttress. We arrived at the base early in the morning and found a pack and running shoes at the start of the route…someone had finished late and bivvied on top the night before. We found the route to be a burly, old-school 5.9, requiring a full arsenal of climbing techniques. It was just what we were looking for! The descent turned out to be fairly adventurous as well (included rapping down a chimney). Thankfully the random shoes and pack that we had encountered that morning were gone by the time we got back to the base.