05/28/2026
November is closing in fast, and on this turn around the fireball, we reach a strange and interesting milestone in American rock climbing. Forty years ago, Earl Wiggins shouldered a rack of hexes and set out on the FA of a smooth and parallel-sided crack situated just up the hillside above a small cattle ranch in southeast Utah.
A decided push, a scratchy bit of 8 mm footage, and Luxury Liner, aka Supercrack, was on line. In the following years, anchors would sprout high and low, spring-loaded camming devices would open the gates of the desert wide, and the Creek would burn sweet and dry on the palette with a juniper finish, hints of wood smoke and horsesh*t. Over a thousand lines would trace the weaknesses of the clean-cut cliffs, and still folks stream from the four corners of the globe to the Four Corners of the American Southwest for a taste of the coyote-and-roadrunner life, tape gloves, sandy burritos/butt cracks, and absolutely perfect splitters. After forty years of exploration and development, of stewardship and traffic, of grade-chasers and vision-questers, Indian Creek has become The Best Crack Climbing in the World.
In the hours leading up to that pivotal and visionary ascent, almost no mention is made of what that party of adventurers did with their time.
Deep breath, trad crusties: apparently, they went bouldering.
Let that out slow.
Camping just down the valley from Supercrack Buttress at the Fringe of Death Canyon, the merry band awoke, warmed, and stretched fiber and sinew on a collection of blocks that season the sage slopes and flats just outside of Canyonlands National Park. This stock of tilted roadside blocks is still an obvious attraction, with whispers of chalk beckoning. It’s the only place cited when I ask the springtime hordes that split the seams of the Donnelley parking lot if they’ve ever gone bouldering in the Creek. “Oh ya, we go, like, on a rest day, take a six pack…sometimes your gobies need a rest!”
Somehow that morning’s motions, performed to calm the mind and lighten the spirits, went forgotten for decades, interred without ceremony beneath tangles of budding history, overshadowed by the ascent of a perfectly parallel crack once thought to be unprotectable. Oddly, today we say “visionary” and mean a splitter handcrack as obvious as a slap in the face, and not one of the subtle, balancey, powerful, flowing test pieces that enrich the valley floor. It was the question of protection that helped make the ascent of Supercrack so very visionary. In a time where American climbing was focused on Yosemite and still battled with the use of pitons as removable protection, one of the greatest concerns was whether the pro would hold in the soft Wingate. It was a bold, face-melting, determined lead, heavy with possibility and hexes and the whole of the future.
1976, and Indian Creek was new school as f**k.
Words by Chris Schulte from his essay published in The Climbing Zine Book.
Photo of Jimmie Dunn and Stewart Green from Stewart's Collection. Read the full piece:
https://climbingzine.com/old-becomes-new-indian-creek-chris-schulte/
