RawCandy

Well, well, well. It seems as if Olympia isn’t quite boulderless after all. I had heard tales of rock sightings at a place called Rock Candy Mt. just 10 minutes or so from Evergreen but didn’t think they would pan out until my friend Kyle showed me a video of a mutual friend of ours doing a boulder problem on what appeared to be perfect granite. He told tales of another boulder as well, smaller in size but promising and another boulder trapped in the confines of a locals backyard. That was all I needed. I swooped up Kyle and we headed out to Rock Candy Mt. to see what fortunes we could find. First we checked out the boulder in the backyard of a rather large man’s property. His pit-bull chained to a line that ran horizontal along his property in order to create a moving, and biting animal fence. The dog was all front though as he buckled before my unwavering sense of pack leadership, yeah I’ve seen an episode or two of the dog whisperer. It turned out the dog was the least of our worries, the rather large man shot down our attempts to scope out the lonely boulder that stood slouched in the corner of his property begging for our attention. It wasn’t exactly an amazing piece of rock, besides the fact that it was at least 8-9 feet tall and looked like it had some promising lines up a nice overhang on bullet stone granite. We gave up on that prospect and headed to the boulder I had seen in Kyle’s video. Up and over some steep muddy roads we finally arrived at the pinnacle of Rock Candy Mt. with a great view of Mt. Rainier and a nice little boulder just off the side of the road.


The majestic Mt. Rainier, almost brings me to tears.


Our little boulder, awwww.

Kyle gave me the run down of the line he and his friend Evan had established on it. A cool little traverse that ended on a slab. The rock quality was amazing, salt and pepper granite very similar to the kind of granite in Squamish and Mt. Home road. A nice jug undercut to a big flat jug side pull, led to the crux pull around on crimps to a cool little slab finish, not bad. I flashed the problem as a warm up, felt pretty hard, I’d say on par with many of the V.2’s I have done. Then I did the slab by itself, a cool V.0, and then I manufactured the direct finish to the traverse utilizing a cool pinch and a high step, probably soft V.2.



Me on my direct finish, Right Handed Pinch Shooters


Kyle on Left Handed Six Shooters(V.2)


Comin' round the Mt.


Almost...



























It's slab time, yeeehaw!


All in all not a bad little boulder at all, after running a couple of laps and Kyle coming close to sending the traverse, which his friend Evan, the first ascentionist called Left Handed Six Shooter because of the shallow divots made by drunken locals blasting their ‘six shooters’ at the poor boulder.
Kyle wanted to show me the other boulder they had found at the base of the mountain. He told me it wasn’t as good as the previous boulder but worth a look. We arrived, and he was right, but I could spy a short one to two move problem on the steeper side of the boulder, which was also of extremely high quality granite, a little darker though. Perched on a small mound of weeds I plopped down chalked up a small slopey right handed pinch and a crimpy slopey pinch for the left and tried beasting it to the lip.


GET SOME! Take that boulder!


I think I'll just take a nap.


I didn’t manage to send so we packed up yet again and went marauding about the various dirt roads that swirled and intersected up the Mt.’s face. We found nothing, unfortunately, but it was a beautiful day and I was just glad to get out and do some climbing on a nice granite boulder and pleased my finger didn’t give me any trouble. In the end, if you’re looking for a good V.2 drive up there and check out this boulder. Don’t be afraid of the random gunshots in the distance, or the pit-bulls on chains, they’re just there to scare rock starved climbers away.