Sam Elias on the Puoux classic Hard Kor 12b

This week, I want to give a shout out to all our crags/woodies/bouldering areas that are our local zones, but are—let’s face it—total piles.

Not everyone gets to live near paradises of perfect rock with actually fun climbing—places like Yosemite or … all of Europe. And the people who do are usually unhappy. Just like more money leads to less happiness, having access to world-class climbing all the time seems to make most of the people I know in this situation a little discontent. The “dream” they are living isn’t fulfilling, but they are too scared to leave the dream life because everyone around them insists that they are the ones living the dream! It’s a vicious cycle.

The happiest, most appreciative people are those who aren’t spoiled all the time, and then you get to sample life’s luxuries. Workin’ stiffs, like you, me and Ben Affleck in all of the movies he’s in.

Winter in Colorado was hard and went on for way too long, like the upper slabs of the Virgin River Gorge. We skipped spring entirely, going from 300-percent snowpack and open ski lifts on Memorial Day to 90-degree weather and Biblically high rivers from snowmelt in the first week of June. I tell you this because it’s the sixth month of the year, and I’ve gotten in exactly four days of climbing at my favorite local crag or Rifle, where, just as the rock finally dried out and conditions got good, flooding caused the County to shut the park down. Balls!

So, where have I been climbing? At one of the worst crags in the America: the Puoux (aka Pukes). The etymology of the Puoux is a riff on the French crag Buoux, the so-called Laboratory of sport climbing for its mad developers’ Frankenstein-esque rock climbs—hideous monsters of rap bolts and drilled pockets. Puoux is like that, only it’s not in Southern France, but 50 feet from I-70.

It’s hard to explain how unpleasant it really is to be at the Puoux. For one it’s loud. Semis and every diesel rig from here to Lubbock, Texas, seems to pass by the Puoux, revving their engines to 9,000 rpms. Right beside the crag is a tunnel, which partially helps with the traffic noise, but it also encourages this strange phenomenon of people laying on their horns for the 30-second duration it takes to drive through the tunnel. I swear, one in six cars is the equivalent of a tantrum-throwing, horn-screeching child.

Nothing is louder, however, than the 4 p.m. coal train that squeals down the tracks every afternoon—and when that combines with the honking horns and rumbling semi trucks, the Puoux crescendos like a beautiful and tragic symphony.

Most of the routes at the Puoux are heavily chipped and poorly bolted, making for dangerous, ankle-shattering climbing on perpetually seeping defiles.

Puoux also Stinks. One season, a dead skunk lay rotting near the climbing, and no one cared enough to move it. The stench seemed appropriate.

My favorite aspect of the Puoux is all the bird shit. There are holds made entirely of black, petrified bird turds that you mantel onto, or shake out on. The one good warm-up climb there occasionally has a little puddle of sticky white goo sitting in the divot of a jug at the last bolt.

Some new climbs have been installed in recent years—natural ones with fun climbing. Problem is, to get to the routes, you have to bat-man up 60 feet of fixed ropes, which have been installed to navigate the loosest, crumbliest pile of choss in a state known for choss. While climbing up the fixed ropes, the belayer has to be attentive in order to dodge the pea- to golf-ball-sized stones that come trundling down.

These new climbs also come with the objective hazard of climbing above and around a Volkswagen-sized beehive embedded in a rotten cave.

Because the Puoux is right next to the Interstate, it attracts a lot of strange lurkers and possible ex-convicts who pull off the highway just to come check out what’s going on. One time, three gangbangers with real bullet holes in their hooptie ride pulled over and walked up along the cliff line. They all looked really tough, like they’de been in gun fights in the hood, except for the fact that one of the guys in the group carried with him a massive, person-sized stuffed frog—like the kind you’d win Coney Island. They looked at the walls and then left.

Another time, a self-proclaimed “writer of fiction novels” (read: a psycho who thought the pencil scribbling he did on napkins in the mental ward was the next great American novel) materialized while I was belaying my friend; he was there, he said, to do research on a character who lives in a cave, and experience what it was like to be a caveman. He hiked up to this one cave, and walked around in the cavern, doing charades like a street mime.

But, you know what? Yeah, the Puoux sucks: it’s dirty, unaesthetic, chipped, loud and a pile. But it’s my local pile and without it, I wouldn’t be able to climb at all. We all have our own areas like that–places we go, that we know aren’t good, but because we get to climb there, because they fill the time in between the big trips to Yosemite, Spain, France, etc., they are ours. The Puoux is the Puoux … but I don’t know what I’d do without it.