The Lion's Den

This is the best line in the area. It is characterized by powerful. technical compression on steep slopers and edges. Start on the lowest decent sideull for your left hand, and your right hand wrapped around the arete, on the smooth, polished, butt cheek-like hold. You'll have a great left foot, and a poor right foot to start.

Down low, you'll find an awesome techy kneebar, some sequential moves, a cool thumb-intensive pinch, and a classic tensiony transition move to a good crimp that allows you to get to the sloper above.

Although the bottom is challenging, you may find more trouble getting through the topout, which involves a heinous power-mantel on the aforementioned sloper, using difficult to see and not very good feet, and a thrutch to a decent crimp way up the left. Tougher because the bottom is a bit tiring. I think this thrutch could be considered a detractor by some, but I thought it was a nice capstone to the difficulty of the boulder- it really doesn't give up until you are standing on the slab above.

It is also possible to do the topout by avoiding the crux finish move, and heading right from the last big sloper. I've heard that this way is easier, maybe v8-ish. One bummer here is that the huge reach out left does seem to be height-dependent.

See area description, and photos. If you find the Unearthed boulders, it's the long, steep, obvious one with small/ill-defined features.

2-3 pads.