Turkey Tank, near Flagstaff, Arizona, is one of the primo bouldering / trad top rope spots to be seen, touched, or tasted, at least in my limited travels across America. I have moved over stone since the mid 1970's, I've been from a sweet spot to learn this game at Cosumnes River Gorge outside Placerville, California (my sipapu or coming out place), to, a little further down the road Sacramento's or Roseville's Deer Park (you walk in to be greeted by an overhanging, 5.10 finger crack, twenty feet tall).
To the west of the west (Robinson Jeffers poem), near the Big Sur coast, is Morro Bay's Quarry. Wo, the view out over the estuary then sandspit to the Great Pacific. My pilgrimage has led me to Stony Point sandstone in the southern smog infested straitjacket of Lost Angels. A hajj for the seeker would be incomplete without Meccas like Tahquitz and Suicide, Joshua Tree, Yosemite and Tuolomne Meadows, Donner Summit and Lovers Leap, Eldorado Canyon or Rocky Mountain National Park. These shrines are grand scale. I'm talking here small scale.
Like wide open spaces as the Dixie Chicks would say, Fort Collins Colorado and Horsetooth. I once met John Gill at a market in Boulder in about 1978. He was one chiseled dude. Mr. Gill looked to me like an Anasazi rock art anthromorph: mammoth upside down pyramid with a head on top, two skinny but stout legs, and arms like flexable ponderosa pines. Back to my journeyman's travel log: nearly east of the east is the Gunks. Megalithic.
The Gunks sport great bouldering and top ropes — P-38 is a five star 5.10 splitter right up from the trail. Hell, great is why the New Paltz quartzite rock band is a Trad Kaaba. All of these convergence zones ring of good earthy vibes. Like incense to the spirit. Time to taste Turkey Tank. This place may beat 'em all, to me anyway, hands down. And the snake is the reason why.
Turkey Tank is a basalt wadi surrounded by awesome geology for you crag minded souls. Good landings, plenty of room for sketch pads, twenty to forty foot vertical, with a few very clean aretes. Overhangs? You bet! The view? Depends on whether you want the skyline . . . or the snake.
I've been at this rock game long enough to know — feel — my elbows don't like to crank hard anymore. These joints hurt as I type out this memo. No joke. Even maximum strength horse linament won't help (Absorbene Elephant strength), DSMO neither (I hate this stuff, makes my skin turn yellow and my breath smells like rotten garlic). A cocktail of vitamin C, Glucosamine, Condtroitin, and Boswillin does little better. I've broke both elbows, one in a mountain bike endo on a single track steep descent, and the other — I don't want to talk about it but it happened in St. George, Utah at a truck stop as I was dieseling up our Ford one ton pick up after building a climbing wall in Buena Vista, Colorado, or as the FM radio country western station (Eagle Country 104) calls the town at eight thousand feet elevation, Beuna Vista. I didn't see any snakes in Beuna Vista nor at one of their hangs, Turtle Rock. "OK," you say, 'tell me about Turkey Tanks. What's the snake got to do with it?"
