Bushwhack Bouldering

Yesterday my friend Todd took us on a walk in the woods north of Frederick to see Bushwhack Rocks.  Mainly a toproping/trad area (see Indy's guide for location and route descriptions), Bushwhack is a beautiful cluster of white rocks with an approach that lives up to its name.  Without being guided by someone who had been there a couple times, we may never have found it through the dense mountain laurel.  And even he may not have found it again without his GPS!  Point being, there's some amazing rock here, but not a place to go unprepared.

If you're going to go check it out, be aware that parking is pretty limited, and try not to block the road or the fire gate.  In the photos below, you'll notice that there's no chalk anywhere on the rocks.  In fact, friction was good enough that we didn't even use any.  Bushwhack doesn't get much traffic, but I'm sure there are at least a few locals who climb there and have managed to keep it looking nice.  Not saying don't use chalk if you're there... just saying to remember that we're guests and respectfully minimize our impact.

As I said, it's mainly an area for roped climbing, but we did come across a couple fun boulder problems, and a few more that would have been good but required much more than the single crashpad we brought.  Even the "good" landings had a few pointy rocks, and others were basically rock-filled pits.  Here were a few of the highlights:

Eduardo Mancera on a low lip traverse

Emily topping out the lip traverse

Eduardo on a slab at the south end

Me on the starting jug of Tourette's Razor  (Photo by Eduardo Mancera)

A long first move to a sharp crimp sidepull (Photo by Todd Hill)

Topping out through better holds (Photo by Todd Hill)

And a video of the above problem, taken by Eduardo Mancera on my little Canon PowerShot.  No music or anything, but at least you can see the problem in motion.