Mike Severino at the base of the Black Gully, wondering why we didn’t bring our gear. Next time.
On September 30, 2006 Mike and I spent about five hours exploring and mapping the Owls Head Cliff area. The weather was beautiful and we were pleased to find ten climbers at the site.
After a 30 minute hike across a soggy meadow, up the muddy logging roads, through the woods and up the steep talus slope to the base of the cliff we were at The Nose, the approximate center of this half mile long 800’ cliff. The area to the right of The Nose is the base of many established routes and provides an open area wide enough to organize gear and belay with the assistance of many large “anchor trees”. This is where we meet John Sykes, author of “Secrets of the Notch”, a guide to climbing in the Franconia Notch area. After talking with John and his partners we moved on another few hundred feet, meeting a second climbing party, until the relatively easy trail ended at the site of a major rock slide at the right or south end of the most developed area. This slide probably removed the lower 100’+ of Energizer and Revelations.
It is obvious that major rock fall is something that occurs with some regularity here. My guess would be that the late winter / early spring freeze and thaw cycles create a dangerous time to climb here. You know some big stuff has come down when you see an 8” oak limb ripped off 50’ up a tree. And the occasional automobile size bolder, not yet weathered, caught in the trees on the talus slope.
Just to the left or west of the nose we met a party of five climbers working a couple of unnamed (?) routes. This side of The Nose appears to have received a bit less foot traffic and is not as well documented on the only know map of the cliff, a long lost and recently resurrected 1989 effort by Tom Boissonneault. Ed Webster worked this area frequently about 15 years ago. This side of The Nose provides a more complete variety of climbing styles with interesting lay backs and overhangs close to the ground, gullies, a small angled chimney, smaller walls with numerous hand and foot holds and wet, mossy areas that should make for good ice. We also noticed several bolted mostly friction routes.
We were surprised at the overall number of bolts, and we could only see the lower portions of the cliff. Any re-bolting project may easily require a few hundred new stainless steel bolts and hangers.
Again our path was obstructed, this time by large tree limbs brought down by one of those huge flying boulders. We decided to bushwhack a new trail down a relatively easy slope to a logging road. We obviously were not the first people with this idea as we found an old stone cairn on our “new” trail. We decided this was a good (read “easier”) trail to the area west of The Nose so we took the time to build several stone cairns to mark the route. At the base of the cliff the trail starts / ends at a car size bolder and large, damaged oak tree.
It was a good scouting mission. We learned a lot, meet some other climbers, picked a few places that we desperately need to climb, got numerous GPS way-points for a trail map, saw moose and dear foot prints on the way out that were not there on our way in and enjoyed the fall colors on a beautiful bug free day.
Black Gully, OHC