Summary

Description

Lisa and I were headed up to Blacksburg for the weekend for a party, and we decided to take Friday off, go up early and get a little climbing in at a new area somewhere in southwestern Virginia. After poking around on the 'net, we decided to try Back Bone Rock near Damascus, VA. We only had limited info to go on so it was a bit of an adventure.

We drove up Friday morning, leaving the house around 9am. It took 4 hours to drive to Damascus, and after one wrong turn, it was easy to find the area. Back Bone Rock is in Cherokee National Forest. There is a parking lot right by the rock and has a $2 parking fee. The downside is that there is not a lot of rock or routes in the area and the rock is fairly fractured (more on that later). The upside is that there are easy trails (with steps, even) up to the top of the rock for setting up a top rope. The routes are approximately 60-70 feet high. There's a really pretty stream running by the end of the Back Bone Rock, and it was really pleasant to listen to the burbling brook throughout the afternoon. We were also in shade throughout the afternoon which made the climbing experience pleasant. (Now, if we could have avoided having the no-see-ums chewing on us later in the afternoon, it would have been close to perfect.)

We scoped out there area from both the bottom and the top and decided to drop a rope over to climb the left corner by the big boulder near the end of the rock. I setup the anchor off of a single, medium sized pine tree near the edge. It looked a little iffy so I backed it up to a smaller tree nearby. Probably not the ideal anchor, but it held for me to rappel down on. :)

Lisa and I each climbed 2-3 variations on the corner and the face. The upper part of the corner felt like it went around 5.7. The lower parts were a little easier. The rock is very fractured, providing a lot of hand and foot holds, but also providing a lot of loose rock. I got into the mode of testing everything before pulling on it. After getting as much as we could out of that route, we stopped for lunch.

After eating, I went up and moved the anchor over to a very large pine tree above the face just over to the left from the corner. This route had a big overhang at the bottom with a face with a lot of variation above. The big overhang didn't look particularly climbable, but the right edge of the overhang had a slightly easier way up so we concentrated our starts there. Lisa scampered up the overhang with no problem and found an easy line up the face. I made it up the overhang start, but didn't do it very elegantly. The face -- like much of the rock -- was pretty dirty, but fun to climb. The start went at about 5.7 or 5.8. The easy like up the face was probably around 5.6.

We each worked on variations of the start and the face a few more times. I was trying to get through the start more elegantly. Lisa and I both tried a much harder line up the left side of the face (maybe 5.9 or 5.10), and we each made it to about the same point about half way up (where the face turns fairly blank). Eventually, the no-see-ums bitting us got bad enough that, combined with us starting to get tired, sent us packing.

We packed up and headed back to Damascus to look for a place to have dinner. Unfortunately, we blinked and missed most of Damascus so we kept driving to Abingdon and drove around looking for restaurants. Nothing jumped out at us, but we eventually found the Starving Artist Cafe a block off Main St. (left turn) next to the library/museum that looks like an old train station. It was a little more upscale than we were dressed for, but nobody seemed to mind. The food was excellent, and we hope to go back when we come back to climbing at Back Bone Rock or around Abingdon.