The Crimp

Start below the small roof and, using a heel-hook, mantle up. Difficulty can be increased by starting on the western-facing side of the rock, traversing the granitic crimp using human crimps before throwing the hook.

That this boulder resembles a hand--and that in this case, the face IS the hand--serves as a plea for the importance rock climbing. It's worth bringing-forth the work of French Anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan who suggests that, "The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove that its activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with which it is connected. 'Being useless with one's fingers,' 'being ham-fisted,' is not a very alarming thing at the level of the species as a whole: A good number of millennia will pass before so old an organ of our neuromotor apparatus actually regresses. But at the individual level the situation is very different. Not having to 'think with one's fingers' is equivalent to lacking a part of one's normally, phylogenetically human mind. Thus the problem of the regression of the hand already exists today at the individual if not the species level."

By forcing us to intensely engage our hands in order to revitalize the mind, The Crimp spotlights the value of climbing as a mode (at least at the individual level) of resisting the regression of the human brain, allowing us to work and strengthen one of the fundamental roots of our humanity. The fact that the problem is solved by using the foot is The Crimp's reminder that the body is an interdependent whole; the hands and the brain simultaneously shape and are shaped by the rest of the body.

(Quote from: Leroi-Gourhan, André.

Gesture and Speech.

Translated by Anna Bonstock Berger. MIT Press, 1993. pp. 255.)

Alongside the trail for the Mountaineers Route, the boulder can be identified by being compared to a crimping hand.

It's nice to have a spotter; snow serves as a great crash-pad in the spring.