Ojai Quarry- December 2009
The boys and I headed up to the Ojai Quarry for one last climbing session of 2009. The Quarry, being only about 15 minutes outside of town, is the closest climbing area to town and a
good place to go when you don’t have a lot of time.
We started with a boulder just upstream from the highway bridge, across the creek from the Retro-Fit boulder. I’ve been looking this one for some time now, but it needed some serious landscaping and cleaning.
The boys and I headed up to the Ojai Quarry for one last climbing session of 2009. The Quarry, being only about 15 minutes outside of town, is the closest climbing area to town and a
good place to go when you don’t have a lot of time.We started with a boulder just upstream from the highway bridge, across the creek from the Retro-Fit boulder. I’ve been looking this one for some time now, but it needed some serious landscaping and cleaning.
So after putting in some work clearing the creek side of the rock, I showed the boys my ideas for this boulder.
There is still quite a bit of water pooled at the bottom of the boulder and with some scattered, smaller sized rocks littering its base making this one hard to protect. We worked out the protection issue with some cleaver placement of the crash pad and good spotting but the boys were unable to send the boulder. Maybe next time. 
Next, we moved down to the Diaper Pool area. This area is usually filled with trash (diapers, ect), but today it was pretty clean. Just up from the pool are a few un-named and un-rated boulder problems of an easy grade and one pretty tough one called The Jabbawockee’s Staff.
This problem starts on a big jug under a mini-roof followed by some tough campus moves to the top out and goes at prolly V4 or V5 (the FA belongs to my man Max Krimmer and friends). I did a little more landscaping and rock scraping in this area and then we climbed till we were pumped.
Next, we moved down to the Diaper Pool area. This area is usually filled with trash (diapers, ect), but today it was pretty clean. Just up from the pool are a few un-named and un-rated boulder problems of an easy grade and one pretty tough one called The Jabbawockee’s Staff.
This problem starts on a big jug under a mini-roof followed by some tough campus moves to the top out and goes at prolly V4 or V5 (the FA belongs to my man Max Krimmer and friends). I did a little more landscaping and rock scraping in this area and then we climbed till we were pumped.
After a little break we moved to a boulder just below the pool that also un-named and un-rated. It’s a nice pyramid shaped boulder, not too tall, but with a variety of problems on it. Again we had to do some yard work before we could climb it as a large Live Oak had broken in half during the last storm and the debris were covering the boulder. After we cleared all the large tree branches away I climbed up to the top of the boulder so I could snap off some branches that were scraping the top of the boulder with my loppers. With the boulder clean and clear, the boys ran laps on the boulders various routes till they were out of gas.
With the sun starting to drop behind the mountain, and the boys all climbed out, we rolled up the crash pad and gear and shook the spot. All in all, it was a nice afternoon of climbing.
