merrick

Oh there are some hard routes and definately potential for lots of hard FA's at Castle, and City of Rocks which is 15 minutes away has lots of hard routes and lots of scary routes if you are looking for that stuff. You can pick up all of the guidebooks in Almo. I the general store and restaurant both have them. and the national park visitors center has them and a bunch of other stuff as well. unfortuneately the city/castle can be quite confusing to get around so it is really nice to have a guidebook. binghams book do get you to the climbs. the rock and ice is the one with nate gold bouldering in india on the cover. i think it had the pilgrimage article, and the aaron ralston article in it. have fun.

bignhams books suck. he doesn't specify trad, mixed, bolts, length of climbs, whether or not you need two ropes to get down. you know the sort of stuff that good guidebooks have in them. but that is what there is. for castle rocks i prefer the rock and ice that came out last year with the topos compared to the castle guidebook. but at least it is cheap. i don't really see castle as a seperate crag. it is just more of the city. It was really crowded there a few weeks ago but by now the summer heat should have driven most people away. i think the biggest difference is that there are tons of easy and safe bolted routes. red rib is a nice 10a arete climb. if you do big tyme do the direct 11a finish. it is fun.

here is my site with tons of pics from a few of my trips. the more recent the trip the better the pics. http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~mpschaef/climbpics/