Travels of the Agnew Family in the "Dog House" 2006-2007

When I made the reservation for Hueco Tanks State Park, I had made the assumption that “Bouldering” was scrambling on boulders so I signed us up for a “Bouldering” Tour. Lesson learned today ---- “Don’t make assumptions”. Ed and I decided that if the people “bouldering” didn’t mind we would go out with them as observers as we were now curious about this sport. We hiked into the closed area and headed to a set of rocks where some of the climbs were easy and used for warming up. Over the course of the day we moved to several different locations. We learned that there are two types of climbs — some are rated for difficultly and others are rated as problems (you have to figure out how to climb them). Some of these climbs were as I expected — scampering up the boulder to the top. Some others were not — crawling across the underside of a rock and working across the edge of the rock then up and over. This is a sport where you need to be in excellent shape, have extremely strong hands and fingers and be fairly flexible as twisting your body into a pretzel shapes seemed to be required in most climbs. A climb would only last a few minutes but it took at lot of energy.


Heading out --- I still thing they look like Sponge Bob.


This fellows just warming up --- one of the easier climbs.


The white specks aren't dust in the camera it's chalk. The climbers chalk their hands and the buildup on the hand holds sometimes breaks off and floats in the are. I think this climb was rated a V9 on a scale from 0 to 15.


This climb is rated as a hard problem --- neither of the two fellows attempting it succeeded in completing the climb.