Rifle Days

By Steph Davis

By KAVU

October 5^th, 2021

Rifle, Colorado is a 3 hour drive from Moab, and I always look forward to the summer months when Rifle is a cool escape from the Moab heat. The canyon is higher elevation with a creek running through it, and limestone walls lining both sides of the dirt road. Rifle is notorious for being a humbling and cryptic place to climb, and lots of people call it chossy, but there’s no denying that it has an incredible variety of super high quality, intricate and physical limestone climbing and some of the best camping anywhere. You just have to embrace the Rifle beat down!

Cajun is my all-time most reliable Rifle partner, but unfortunately she can’t belay. So Ian went out with me for a couple of short weekend trips, I made another two day trip to meet up with my friend Mary, and then I made plans to meet up with my other most reliable climbing partners, Brittany, Nathan and Kitty Maples.

For them, Rifle is 5 hours from Salt Lake city, so we decided to spend a week at Rifle to make it worth the drive, knowing we’d leave there fully exhausted. Brittany hadn’t been to Rifle in years, and Nathan and Kitty had never been there, so they were in for an awesome surprise

—great weather, and endless amazing routes.

Kitty seemed to enjoy the climbing and the lurking, but he went t-balls over the hunting. He went on a murderous rampage at the campsite, and I literally had to chase him down and pry chipmunks and a robin out of his month 3 times, as well as separate him from staring down a small petrified rodent who was trying to hide its face in the ground. Usually camping is the most relaxing part of climbing at Rifle, but not this time (thanks Kitty).

Rifle is kind of like an "all-you-can-eat buffet" —you want to climb EVERYTHING and there are endless routes to climb, but your forearms give out long before your project list.