DESERt Crack Climbing | Rescue SKILLS Clinic

CRACK CLINIC:

If you shy away from crack climbing because it's uncomfortable, painful, or just doesn't click, spend sometime the season building solid technique OR fine tunning your crack climbing skills. Our instructional clinic will focus on how to get the most comfortable jam for your body and ways to move efficiently up a crack route. Don't let the void hold you back any longer!

Join us to sample a variety of crack sizes and work to understand the nuance of getting stuck and moving up!

RESCUE CLINIC:

Shit happens, can you figure out a solution!? Smile's Rock Rescue Clinic solves the less-than-ideal what-ifs of climbing. This clinic will focus on building strong foundational skills in top belaying, climber assists, device manipulation for lowers, rappelling, ascending a line, and bailing off a route.

Meet at Red Rock Bakery & Cafe in Moab at 8:30am. Intros and ambitions laid out, we will caravan to the crag. Saturday is crack climbing techniques.

Sunday is rescue scenarios where we’ll let the skin and muscles rest as we work on systems.

During the Pennsylvanian Period (320-285 million years ago), much of Utah was covered by ocean. A small arm of the Ancestral Rockies penetrated into Utah from the east, north of the Moab area. Extending south from the tip of these highlands was an area that was occasionally submerged, occasionally "high and dry." The Moab region was a gigantic deep "sinkhole," called the Paradox Basin.

From time to time, the Paradox Basin would be flooded with ocean water as sea levels rose (or the land bridge subsided). A layer of limestone would form in this new ocean bay. Then the Paradox Basin would be cut off from the ocean and would dry out, leaving evaporated salts, capped with shale. Multiple such cycles occurred over millions of years, leaving over 1000 feet of salt. No rock of the Pennsylvanian Period is exposed at the surface in the Moab area, but the shape of the land has been affected by the Paradox Formation salt (more on this later).

Potash (a salt of potassium) is mined from Paradox Formation deposits deep under the Colorado River. The plant can be seen from here at the overlook at the end of the Amassa Back trail.