The Jazzhammer Index of Bouldering Areas
- Index measures the density of bouldering problems in a given area. The index is number of problems (listed on Mountain Project)/Area (measured in acres.
- Highlighted in red are areas that I think are breaking the system because they are too small.
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Hello everyone! This is the Rock Behind the Climb, the podcast about the geology of different rock climbing spots. I am your host Quinn “The Jazzhammer” Todzo. First of all, I’m Happy to be back, no pun intended!
I have a very special episode for you today.
I am covering one of the most world class destinations for bouldering at all skill levels: The Volcanic Tablelands of Bishop California.
The Volcanic Tablelands are known for 2 clusters of boulders known as the Happys and the Sads.
What makes this climbing area special is how approachable it is. The volcanic rock provides plenty of positive hand holds, and the boulder problems feel like a climbing gym. Add to that a relatively short approach, a huge concentration of boulders, and well protected fall zones.
It’s also only a 15 minute drive from the town of Bishop. You could get a cinnamon bun from one of the town bakeries and still be licking your fingers when you arrive at the boulders
All that is to say, this area is also super popular. On a given holiday weekend, there can be droves of gym buddies, kid teams, and road trippers all getting after it.
Now, I realize that talking about the crowds may have deterred some of you listeners from going. However, I promise that the geology is so cool that it’s worth braving the crowds, or just not going on a holiday weekend.
Roadmap
OK, so for this episode, I wanted to try giving you all a roadmap for what I am going to talk about. I’ve gotten the complaint in the past that sometimes it’s hard to follow along, so I figured maybe giving a little table of contents will help those of you who tend to lose focus at times.
So I am gonna start out talking about the town of Bishop’s geologic context and bouldering reputation, since I haven’t done an episode about Bishop and it’s a pretty unique climbing destination.
Then, I’ll get into the tablelands and how the Happy and Sad areas were formed. Spoiler, they were formed differently even though they seem similar.
After that, I’ll get into more detail on the climbing and the rock itself
And to finish up, I present the new, revolutionary Jazzhammer Index for Bouldering Areas, and why the Happys and Sads are mathematically the best climbing area. So, stay tuned to find out what that is.
Bishop As a Climbing Destination
Before I get into the Tablelands, I want to talk a bit about Bishop.
So the Volcanic Tablelands are located right next to the town of Bishop, California. Rock climbers know Bishop well as the bouldering capital of the world. People outside of the climbing world have never heard of it. That’s because Bishop is located in the eastern sierra of California. It’s a town of population 2000, and a minimum of like a 4 hour drive from any major metropolitan area. And it feels like the wild wild west. The tiny enclave is miles away from any other human settlement and sits in the middle of an open and wild desert landscape. You might even start to feel yourself saying “Yee-haw” and “Bustle my britches, if it ain’t a new podcast by the Jazzhammer”. But alas, there is a dead giveaway that you are not in fact a cowboy or cowgirl on the plains of Wyoming in 1868. It’s the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada and White Mountain Ranges that mark the west and east skylines of course. And maybe the fact that youre probably driving in a car.
Geology wise the town is in the Owen’s River Valley which is the middle of what geologists call a Basin and Range province. Basically the mountains that are immediately to the west and east of town used to be clumped together, but over time have spread apart creating the Owens River valley in the middle. It’s the same general process that created Death Valley National Park. Because the town of Bishop is in the middle of two mountain ranges pulling apart from one another, there are a lot of interesting geologic features nearby like a multitude of earthquake faults, and an imploded volcano. The faults, volcanic activity, and of course mountains contribute heavily to why there is so much good climbing.
What makes it the bouldering capital is that you have 2 of the best bouldering areas in the world that are both just a 15 minute drive from the center of town. To the west you have the area known as the Buttermilks. It’s a collection of the biggest boulders you have ever seen splayed out across the rolling desert landscape. It’s well known for having some of the hardest and tallest boulder routes that get international attention when they are climbed. It was the first bouldering area established in Bishop back in the 70s.
If Bishop is the New York City of American Bouldering, then the Buttermilks are Manhattan. All the celebrities hang out there. The boulders are huge like manhattan skyscrapers. It’s intimidating and exciting. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, but more likely you’ll get your ass handed to you.
The Volcanic Tablelands, on the other hand, are like Brooklyn. Cool, trendy, fun, artsy, or at least it was until it became gentrified by comp kids. Just kidding. But you get the picture, in the Tablelands, you’re still just as much in New York City, just the slightly lesser recognized part.
Ok despite my temptation to make more metaphors about Bishop, I am going to move on. Let’s chat a little more about the features of the Volcanic Tablelands.
The Tablelands Description
Basically the Tablelands are a big flat mesa of volcanic rock. A mesa is a landscape feature with an almost perfectly flat top and shear, steep sides. The Volcanic Tablelands Mesa stretches for miles within the Owens River Valley, and meets its western margin, or end, right where all of the bouldering is located, just north of town.
The boulders are located in mini canyons carved into the mesa. The Happy Boulders are in one canyon, and the sad boulders are in a different canyon about a mile up the road. The Happy’s is bigger, about the width of 2 football fields, and stretches about a half mile once you get to the climbing part. The Sads is only the width of 1 football field and only about a quarter of a mile long at the climbing part.
Suffice to say though that neither one is very big. But, in the space of the Happy’s and Sad’s there are more than 750 problems in the two areas combined. That is a ton of problems in a very small area.
Both canyons were shaped by Normal Faults, which are places where the ground slides downwards into the earth. Think of a bookshelf where all of the books are leaning up against a book end. The ground is like the top of the books on that bookshelf. If you pull away that bookend a little bit, those books will start to slide down next to each other. That’s basically normal faulting. The cracks between the books are the normal faults where the books are sliding down. If you were standing on top of one of the books, you would feel like you are dropping compared to the book in front of you.
In the case of both the Sad’s, a normal fault is located right along the bottom of the canyon causing the bottom of the canyon to drop. This in turn caused the boulders to break off from the volcanic mesa and tumble into the canyon.
The Happy’s actually started out as a flowing stream channel. Without the faulting, it might still be a primary drainage path for the Tablelands. However, the faults cut it off and dug deep depressions upstream of where all of the bouldering is. Now of course it’s dried out. Likely the large number of boulders are a result of the stream channel collapsing over time combined with the normal faulting I just talked about.
It kind of makes sense if you visit the Happy’s and the Sad’s that there is this difference in how they were formed. The Happy’s is nice and wide and flat. It feels like a nice, perfect river channel. The Sad’s on the other hand is narrower and the boulders are kind of on top of each other. It feels more chewed up, which is because you are literally on top of where the earth is ripping apart. It is also the reason you have the extensive cave area in the Sad’s known as the Ice Caves, where there are a lot of hard and cool roof problems. These caves are just boulders that are stacked on each other, but you don’t really see this in the Happy’s. Another consequence of being a narrower canyon that was formed by faulting instead of water.
As an aside, if the Happy’s kept flowing, it might look more like the nearby Owen’s river gorge which is a sport climbing area next to the flowing Owen’s River. Instead of being like 30 feet deep like the Happy’s Canyon, it's hundreds of feet deep and has massive vertical walls perfect for bolted sport climbing. The rock though, is exactly the same.
The Climbing in the Happy’s and Sad’s
Now, lets talk about the climbing and the rock itself.
The climbing is fantastic. As I talked about at the top of this episode it feels like a climbing gym. What I mean by that is you have a huge range of different styles and problem types on pretty solid rock. Problems like Acid Wash V9 and The Fang V4 are overhanging cave type problems. Solarium, a V4 features a number of balancey crimp moves on a vertical face. Ketron Classic uses dynamic movement on slopers and jugs to eventually make a big throw to a bucket before hitting the top. You have problems with knee bars and dynos, crimp rails, and overhanging roofs. The one thing you don’t really find are sketchy slabs that rely on friction and people screaming at you to “Trust the Feet”. But you know, “Oh well”
In fact, not really a place where you need the friction of the rock, or have it for that matter.
I would argue that for the average outdoor boulderer, the Happys and Sads are more accessible than their pancake ingredient counterpart because the climbing style is more varied and there are way more problems. If you get bored or stuck, it is not hard to find another thing to work on.
The rock is called Volcanic Tuff, which is a rock type formed from volcanic ash clumping together. The volcanic ash came from the long valley caldera, one of the biggest volcanoes on earth. The eruption occurred about 760,000 years ago, in an eruption that has been characterized in the “Super-Collasal” tier, which is about 100 times bigger than Mt. St. Helens. If you were wondering, there is one tier above “super-collasal” called “mega-collasal”, but I digress. “Super-collassal” is still pretty dang big.
Anyway, the rock formed by this volcanic ash is characterized by being strong and having pockets that range from finger size to small cave size. The strength of the rock comes from the fact that the ash had to melt together to create it, which makes the rock well bonded together.
The pockets were created because when the ash settled, sometimes there were gaps between particles or clumps of particles. As the rock cooled, these gaps remained open creating the holds we know and love.
The classic problem Solarium in the Happys featured a lot of these air gap holds. You start this climb on some big edges and work your way through finger pockets and tiny crimps before grabbing the larger jugs near the lip. Once you get to the lip it is all big holds on plate like jugs to finish the climb. All of the first crimps and pockets appear to me to be areas where there was trapped gas between clumps of volcanic ash that eventually gave way to the holds on Solarium.
For this boulder rock specifically, I would guess that the reason you see small holds at the beginning and finish with mega jugs is because the top of the boulder sees more weathering than the bottom which enlarges the pockets in the rock. So in this case, weathering over time with water and ice there led to more erosion which leads to larger holds on the top of the boulder.
Comparing the Tablelands to Other Areas
OK so now the part you’ve been waiting for, the unveiling of the JazzHammer Index of Bouldering Spots.
In bouldering, I would consider myself more of a volume boulderer rather than a projector. When I go to a new area, I like trying as many climbs as I possibly can. In that vein, I love an area with a large density of problems because a) you don’t have to travel very far between boulders, and b) there are a lot of options for climbing stuff if you have limited time and a lot of energy.
The feature that I find most compelling about the Volcanic Tablelands is just the density of boulder problems.
The concentration of problems and boulders is certainly felt when you go to the Volcanic Tablelands. It’s like a 15 minute walk to get from one end of each canyon to the other, and they each feature hundreds of problems. You can probably climb 10 problems before moving your pad 10 feet.
I was curious how the concentration of problems in the Happy’s and Sad’s compares to other popular bouldering spots. So, I created what I am calling the Jazzhammer Index. Basically, it’s a ratio of the number of boulder problems divided by the area where the boulders are located, measured in acres. The higher you are on the Jazzhammer Index, the larger the concentration of boulder problems.
OK so how are some of the most well known bouldering areas in America on the Index.
On the low end you have Joes Valley and Yosemite Valley. Both are around 0.2 points on the Jazzhammer Index. Pretty low. But Makes sense. At Joes, you have to drive to each spot between boulders. And Yosemite Valley, for all the hype it gets, doesn’t actually have that many problems.
The next tier is around 6-8 points on the Jazzhammer Index. Here, You have the Hidden Valley Campground area in Joshua Tree, and The Kraft Bouldering Area in Red Rocks. These areas have a great density of boulders and you can climb all day easily in the same place.
The Buttermilks is a little higher than those 2, coming in with an impressive Jazzhammer Index of 11.
And then you have the Happys and the Sads, coming in at a whopping 22 and 19 respectively on the Jazzhammer Index. That means that the happy’s and sad’s are about twice as dense as the Buttermilks, 3 times as dense with boulders than Red Rocks or J Tree, and 100 times as dense as Yosemite Valley or Joey Valley which are all world renowned for how good they are.
So there you have it folks. According to the Jazzhammer Index, The Happys and Sads are 100 times better than Yosemite Valley. For bouldering.
I should say, the Jazzhammer Index does break down a bit for small areas. Like for instance Mortar Rock Park, which is this rock in the middle of a Berkeley neighborhood that has 65 different variations of what is basically the same route. It would come in at a Jazzhammer Index of 411.
So clearly, there is some work to be done there, but alas, it’s a start. The point is though, that the Volcanic Tablelands are great, so go check it out, and I’ll catch you on the next one.
Jazzhammer Out.
https://sierra.sitehost.iu.edu/papers/2012/Southworth.pdf - Bishop Tuff
https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/long-valley-caldera/science/geologic-history-long-valley-mono-basin-region - Long Valley Caldera
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364510829_Quantifying_and_analyzing_rock_trait_distributions_of_rocky_fault_scarps_using_a_deep_learning_approach - Specific Studies of the Volcanic Tablelands
https://owensvalley.org/geology/ - general geology of Owens River Valley
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsw/lithosphere/article/8/3/238/145872/Observations-on-normal-fault-scarp-morphology-and - morphology of the tablelands and interesting analysis of the Happy Boulders Channel
