A 20-year love affair with a little-known canyon

Castlewood Canyon, about two miles south of Franktown, Colo., isn’t exactly a rock-climbing Mecca. It is east of I-25, for one thing, which is practically Kansas to most climbers living in or visiting Colorado. The rock here isn’t the vertically seamed granite of Lumpy Ridge, or the 300-foot sandstone walls of Eldorado Canyon. Nobody’s driving cross-country to come climbing here.

Castlewood’s longest climb is about 65 feet tall, and most are 35 to 50 feet. The rock is conglomerate sandstone, with a consistency like sloppily poured concrete, and large smooth pebbles embedded at intervals regular enough to provide handholds and footholds to interest rock climbers. Castlewood’s routes aren’t crowded with young, sexy, shirtless climbers in Prana pants who spend all week in a climbing gym to come here and test themselves.

Mike Lane, 48, is here, though, trying to concentrate on leading a 5.9 bolted climb with a tricky sequence of moves in the Wendell Spire area on the canyon’s North Rim. At the crux, the tough part is committing to a hand jam in a thin crack on the right.

“Chloe, don’t talk to your mother while she’s belaying,” Mike yells down from about 30 feet up the wall, just past the crux. His wife, Suzanne, stands on the ground below, at the other end of the rope, attentively leaning her head back to watch Mike’s progress. Chloe, 9, wanders around the base of the climb restlessly, waiting for her turn when Dad’s done.

Things are different now than they were 20 years ago, when Mike and his friend Tom Hanson were young and single and transforming this canyon into a climbing area with hundreds of sport (bolted) climbing routes and hundreds of boulder problems. On this late-March Sunday, while Mike works his way up this route, Tom, 50, is 100 feet down canyon, belaying his friend Chris Cavallaro on a hard sport route.

On a typical winter weekend, half a dozen friends of Tom and/or Mike convene here at least one day to climb. Today, there are 12 in the group, mostly men; mostly late-30s and early-40s. Cavallaro, 37 and a new father, will lead the majority of the hardest routes.

“Cav’s the ropegun these days, especially for the over-the-hill has-beens,” Tom says.

In the late-’80s, after years of climbing in the Denver/Boulder area, Tom discovered Castlewood Canyon, and realized (at almost the exact same time Mike did) that it could be developed into a climbing area, despite its lack of routes that could be protected with removable gear. One day while exploring the canyon, Tom heard the sounds of tap-and-twist drills being pounded into rock and followed it to what is now known as the Falls Wall, on the canyon’s East Rim. He found three guys he didn’t know; Mike, Richard Wright and Tod Anderson, hanging off the rim on three separate ropes, putting up bolts for a climb they’d call Swinging Sirloin.

Shortly after meeting and separately bolting lines in the canyon, Tom, Mike, Tod and a friend named Scott Sills began working together, buying Bosch cordless drills and putting up hundreds of sport-climbing lines on the walls of this scrappy, petite canyon. Others like Richard Wright, Chris Drysdale and Tom’s brother Rob joined in or put up some of their own routes. There were no regulations on fixed climbing hardware in those days, so, if they decided a line was climbable, it was bolted.

Nowadays, bolting a route in Castlewood involves submitting a proposal, often with photos, to several rounds of scrutiny from various boards — similar to most developed climbing areas, even though most visitors to Castlewood, now a state park, won’t wander off the main trails and get close enough to the walls to even see the bolts. Mike is currently awaiting approval of a line he wants to bolt.

Tod and Scott don’t come around as much anymore. Tod, now 48, lives in northwest Denver, at least an hour’s drive from the park’s south entrance. Castlewood was only one of the areas he helped to develop on the Front Range — he also took his drill and developed large sections of climbing areas at North Table Mountain and Clear Creek Canyon near Golden, and perhaps most notably, Devil’s Head, a granite formation in the South Platte that he’s still exploring.