Acadia

[*Chris*]

I'm headed down to Acadia Natn. Park in Maine next weekend to spend a week hiking and camping. I was looking around the park service's website when I found this:

Climbing Closure
The climbing routes at Otter Cliffs previously known as the Black Crack, Riptide, and Razor Crack (aka, Razor Flake) were closed on Thursday, July 17, 2008, until further notice. On the evening of July 15, a rockfall occurred in the Otter Cliffs area. At that time, several very large boulders broke free from the cliff face. Several additional boulders are still attached and remain unstable on the cliff face above what were once these climbing routes.

Park staff will continue to monitor the cliff conditions and will re-open the closed section of the Otter Cliffs area as soon as we are able to assess the integrity of the remaining rock and removes loose debris from the cliff face.

I'm pretty darn sure that those boulders formed a significant leg of a trad anchor we built there last year when climbing Razor Crack! They sure seemed bomber at the time.

[Burley]

http://www.neclimbs.com/smf_bbs/index.php?topic=4158.0

Oh my. The razor crack face came off... Gravity wins again. Is rock lobster next?

Use nuts in those rotten Welsford flakes and put them in deep... cams kill! Go aid climbing if you want to see what a cam can do to crap granite... still gives me nightmares.

[*Chris*]

Holy Carp!
The park service site made it sound like just the top boulders came off... not the whole face. That's unfortunate, it was a fun line.

[Shawn B]

Wow. It looks like the boulders that we would sling for the razor flake anchor are still there. Looks like the whole face that formed razor flake to black crack peeled off from the fist sized crack to the edge. I've used that crack for a natural anchor for riptide. That was at least 10 feet of rock from the crack to the edge. The fist crack was only at most 3 feet deep. Who'd a thunk that whole thing would go? Middle of the summer too. Did they have another earth quake? Scaaarry. Did it go during the night? Very lucky a pile of people weren't killed. I've seen groups of 10-15 people that would have been either squished or rode the rockfall in that area at once many times.