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Supercrack in central Oregon?


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While climbing Karate Crack at Smith last week, I got in a discussion comparing fun crack climbs with some Bend climbers. They made the remarkable claim that there exists somewhere in central Oregon, a crack as good as Supercrack (of Moab, presumably.) They had not done or even seen this climb themselves but were interested in finding it. Supposedly, the local free weekly newspaper ran a vague blurb about a "shangri la of crack climbing" near Madras in its "Best Of" issue.

While it is easy to dismiss rumored hype, perhaps there is some nice desert crack climbing closer to Portland than Smith. Surely, if this supercrack exists, someone on this board knows about it.

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My brother is into geocaching. There was some controversy about a place in Oregon last year called "Oregon Hell Hole". A place where the lower ground is literely sliding down the mountain like a crevasse creating a huge 1 1/2 mile long gouge in the earth. This place was removed from all maps sometime in the 1930s because it was deemed too "dangerous" to visit.

 

So the folks he knows from a geocaching website went to a university library in Portland and found a map from the 1920's which clearly identified it. My brother then took me out looking for it armed with a (poor) copy of the map and his gps. We found it, and it was pretty impressive. The section we saw had pretty dirty walls, maybe 200 or 250' down. It was maybe suitable for exploring, but definitely not in that spot for climbing.

 

See here for a pbs video he also found on this place.

 

http://pbs-afg.virage.com/vss-bin/vss_SR/pbs_afg/search?template=search.tmpl&query=hell+hole&query2=&query3=or

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uh, hmmmm...... thank you for inquiring . . . . all our crack identification agents are , uh, busy right now, please know that your request is important to us, and we will take your request in the order in which it was received . . . . please continue to hold.

 

Meanwhile, please loan me all your 2-inch cams while we go do some "research" on your inquiry . . . .

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rbw1996,

Is the above pic on the reservation or is that some other crag? Also, there are a bunch of pretty good and I think mostly unclimbed basalt cracks of high high quality west of Dayville along the John day river where the road forks and goes either north towards the fossil beds or west towards prineville.

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Shapp I was on that road up to Hwy 218 on Saturday as I am hunting elk over there this year. It was hard to see alot with a big burn going on the Pine Creek COnservation Area, but I could see promise. Along the Deschutes, near a tributary stream there are some amazing splitter cracks. Hint: downstream from Warm Springs town and you can't get there from the warm springs Kaneeta Resort side. Hence why it is close to Madras. If any of you are trout fishermen, then you already know the answer.

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