In early March, an unknown person or persons went to Red Rock Canyon Open Space, a Colorado Springs’ city park, and stole over 25 bolt hangers and anchor material including Fixe ring anchors and forged chain from a dozen routes. The thief obviously had some climbing skills and equipment since many of the hangers were taken high on routes and would be inaccessible except by rappelling down from the cliff-top.
I mean, who does that? What climber goes to a public climbing area and steals bolt hangers from existing routes? It is very discouraging that some lowlife climbers would feel the need to steal the fixed protection used by thousands of climbers on over 100 routes since the park opened in 2004.
The good news is that there are more good people out there than evil hanger-stealing thugs. Within a couple weeks of the thievery, an unknown climber replaced about half of the missing hardware with new hangers, undoubtedly bought with their own hard-earned cash. I give a hearty shout-out and thank you to that unknown climber for stepping forward and doing a good deed.
Last week Collin Powers with the Pikes Peak Group of the Colorado Mountain Club also messaged me that the club was willing to buy the remainder of the replacement gear to restore the routes to their original condition. Collin bought a dozen Metolius bolt hangers from the Mountain Chalet and painted them to match the color of the sandstone at Red Rock Canyon.
A couple days ago, Collin and I went over to Red Rocks on a windy morning and reinstalled ten of the hangers on three routes at the Whale’s Tail. Yesterday we purchased eight one-foot lengths of forged 3/8-inch chain for four sets to reinstall on missing anchors. Thank you Collin and the Colorado Mountain Club for also helping restore these popular climbing routes so both new and experienced climbers can once safely enjoy this marvelous local climbing area.
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