Upper West Bolton Cliff History

[Seth Maciejowski]

Hello CragVT Community,

The CragVT board is looking to compile all the local knowledge of the history of the Upper West Bolton Cliff off the Bolton Notch road. Your help on this will be greatly appreciated and help us greatly on an upcoming project. Please post any information you can provide/dig up to this thread. Thank you!

[Travis Peckham]

Hi Seth,

I just dug around in my old email and found this from some correspondence I had with John Bouchard... Here's a little-know fact about the Rose Crack...

John Bouchard:
I did quite a few free routes in the Bolton Notch area. The best was the
Rose Crack which was named after "Li Rouman de la Rose," a 13th century
french poem I was translating during my senior year at UVM...

Not much- but it's a start...

Who did the FA or The Thorn? How about Chockstone? These things might be lost forever at this point. Probably a first recorded ascent might be all we could hope for.

I can also remember that Upper West was closed for most of the 90's and only came open again late in the decade. I don't think this was the first time it was closed either. It's been somewhat plagued by access issues in the past. We're lucky to have had it open for the last 10 years or so...

Travis

[adam sherman]

I recall that part of the history of Upper West was that the Guard used to use the slabs on on the south end for practice during the 80's(?) and that there used to be very large funky bolts installed here and there on the south end. I think someone from the Guard came up and removed all the hardware when the land was sold back in the '90's to the Remsens. I bet Bill Pelkey, Tom Kontos, or some of those guys would have cleared details on that part of the history.

For what it is worth...

Adam