Montana Trip, Part I: Climbing in the City of Rocks

Our daughter Belyn didn’t get off the river trip she was working until Sunday (if you are keeping track at all, she is done with her NASA internship and managed to get work on a few end-of-summer river trips) and our son Ney -J wanted to go to a Music festival, so it looked like our planned week-long Glacier National Park vacation wouldn’t start until Monday.

Betsy and I then realized, what the heck, we could just takeoff for the weekend, and then gather up the kids somehow with the plane on Monday.  I had heard from friends in Idaho that the City of Rocks in southern Idaho is a really fun place to climb and camp, and they were right.

We flew out early Saturday and were dismayed by the amount of smoke from the California Rim fire.  Not only were the Sierra Nevada mountains covered, we couldn’t even see the ground until we reached the far end of Nevada, and smoke from the fire reached into Idaho.  Incredible and incredibly sad.

We landed in Twin Falls Idaho and rented a car for the two hour drive.  The City of Rocks turned out to be a beautiful spot with camping among the rocks, with many hundreds of rock climbs dispersed throughout the area such that it doesn’t seem crowded, even if there are a lot of climbers around. Now we have to go back.

High Sierra Smoke

Bets Rappelling off “Elephant Rock”

City of Rocks

Storm over City of Rocks