The 10 Best Summer Crags

Summer is simply the best time to go cragging. The days are long, with lots of light for early starts and late finishes. The weather is friendly, with only the occasional monsoon rain to shut you down. Temps cool off at night but don’t get so cold that the rock is icy in the mornings. There’s greenery everywhere, with the flowers popping, streams running high, and swimming holes full for cooling off. Everyone is out and about, traveling and loving life. And, if you’re lucky enough to be on an academic calendar, you have three solid months off to travel and climb.

A time-honored tradition in North America is the summer climbing trip—usually a road trip, but plenty of destinations are reachable via air as well. The key ingredients for summer-cragging mega-destinations are universal: shade, and lots of it; a high or higher elevation, for cool temperatures; good options for camping and overnight stays; and tons of climbing at all grades, so you can push yourself with a smorgasbord of mileage, onsights, and projects, both mini- and mega- alike, whatever your level.

Here are the 10 best summer crags in North America, for your trip-planning pleasure.

Back of the Lake, Lake Louise, Alberta

While it’s not the biggest destination (100-plus routes listed on Mountain Project), the Back of the Lake, situated on the banks of robin’s-egg-blue Lake Louise in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, has some of the best views in the world. The castellated summits of Banff National Park rear up overhead, and a busy tourist trail circumnavigating the lake brings you easily to the cliffs.

Situated at 5,000 feet above sea level, the steep quartzite bluffs offer good summer temps and memorable, rope-stretching, technical pitches on vertical to gently overhanging, streaked rock. Some routes are up to two ropelengths long, and there are mixed and traditional lines, with dozens of classics in the 5.10 to 5.12 range. The cliff is perhaps most famous for Sonnie Trotter’s The Path, a benchmark 5.14a R that Trotter sent on (tiny) gear in 2007 after realizing it would protect naturally and then de-bolting it.

Squamish, British Columbia

Seaside Squamish is legendary, a beetling of granite cliffs and boulders with perfect white stone all along the fjord of Howe Sound—and, in the case of Anvil Island, which is accessible only by boat, in the fjord itself. It’s far north latitudinally and right on the ocean, so temps are cool; the one risk is rain, which is frequent and explains the lush setting and vibrant-green moss carpeting the granite.

Formerly a backwater town populated by loggers and climbers, tiny Squamish has become hip, meaning it’s expensive and overrun and no longer an easy place to dirtbag. Still, the climbing remains vast (hundreds of routes and boulder problems), varied, and eternal. Fancy a multi-pitch moderate or maybe something testier, up to 5.13, on cracks and slabs? The massive Stawamus Chief has you. Want to gawk at a sickly overhanging Chris Sharma 5.14d? Then gaze upon Dreamcatcher. Or maybe bouldering is your jam, in which case explore the thick forest—where movies have been filmed—below the formations to find Squamish’s legendary crimp and compression blocs.

Tuolumne Meadows, California

When it’s too hot down in “the Ditch”—the locals’ name for Yosemite Valley—Sierra-granite aficionados head for Tuolumne Meadows, at 8,500-plus feet along the Tioga Road, high in Yosemite National Park. Here, you’ll find standout domes like Fairview, Medlicott, and Pywiack studded with the area’s signature knobs and painted in arrow-straight black and gold streaks. Routes range from single-pitch and sporty/mixed, in grades from 5.9 to 5.14, on up to iconic multi-pitch endeavors like the Bachar-Yerian, a 5.11 X with huge runouts between the scant bolts the late John Bachar hand-drilled ground-up, hanging from hooks on the climb’s tiny knobs way back in 1981.

While it’s not exactly “cragging,” Tuolomne also offers superb moderate alpine rock, with the busy Southeast Buttress (5.6) of Cathedral Peak and the ridge run of Matthes Crest (5.7) topping the list. Also not to be missed is Mount Conness (12,590 feet), with two sublime mellow ridge climbs and the 1,200-foot Harding Route (5.10c) on the scooped southwest face. There is also a ton of bouldering in Tuolumne—hike around and explore!

Staunton State Park, Colorado

With cliffs arrayed between 8,000 and 10,000 feet and ample shade in the corridors, caves, and overhanging walls tucked into the ponderosa-studded hillside, the granite domeland of Staunton State Park is a climbers’ paradise. Staunton was originally ranchland, part of a homestead established in 1918. The park, cobbled together from land donations and purchases, opened in 2013, which meant—unlike other areas in the greater South Platte region—that there was no climbing history. This let climbers put in rap-bolted sport routes in a traddy region that to this day still has bolt wars (although it’s a style that makes sense for Staunton’s steep, largely crack-less rock).

Staunton has myriad domes with myriad aspects and classics at all grades, concentrated mostly in the 5.10 to 5.13+ range. Standout walls include the adjacent Tan Corridor and the Dungeon, the latter a mega-steep swell that’s shady (and very busy), with Rifle-style kneebar and jug climbing and side-by-side clip-ups. New stuff is always going in, including the recent cave of the Black Hole, plus there are good moderate slabs for novice climbers, fun mountain biking, great raspberry picking come August, and a campground in the park.

Rifle, Colorado

Rifle Mountain Park is one of America’s oldest sport areas, with the first major wave of routes bolted in the early 1990s, as the steep revolution swept the country and climbers began turning their attention to caves and walls previously viewed as “too chossy.” Rifle’s limestone is infamous for its slickness and weird, pinchy, blocky features, but as you warm to the style, the climbing becomes more enjoyable, even with 30-plus years of built-up chalk and boot rubber. Just bring sticky kneepads, and don’t worry—the locals will spray you down with kneebar beta, whether you want it or not!

Climbs here range from 5.7 to 5.15, with 500 listed across 45 sectors in the late Darek Krol’s excellent guidebook Rifle: A Climber’s Guide. The canyon shines at 5.12 and above, but the past 20 years have also seen user-friendly moderate walls go in after a bolting ban was lifted in the early 2000s. Best of all, the canyon is at 7,500 feet and you can find shade any time of day, the approaches are never longer than 5 minutes, some cliffs—like the Project Wall and the Arsenal—are literally roadside, and there’s a sweet, tranquil campground above the canyon proper. This is sport cragging at its best, pumpiest, and most convenient.

Acadia National Park, Maine

Acadia National Park is famed as the first place in the United States from which you can view the sunrise, as our home star comes up over the North Atlantic as seen from the Eastern Seaboard’s high point of Cadillac Mountain (1,527 feet). This national park along coastal Maine is hyper-busy (3.87 million visitors in 2023) and far from huge, centered on scenic, craggy Mount Desert Island. But fortunately, most visitors aren’t there for the rocks.

The climbing here is mostly traditional and in the 5.8 to 5.11 range, with an emphasis on corners and cracks; the inland crag the Precipice and the seaside Otter Cliffs are the main draws, with both zones offering dozens of clean, appealing lines up smooth pink, tan, and gray granite. Acadia’s far-northern location and sea breezes keep things cool in the summer, and there are some 300 routes. If the trad-style cragging isn’t your, ahem, jam, then the overhanging white granite of Shagg Cragg, three hours away, will give you your sport fix, with 60-plus primarily sport climbs up to 5.13d on this unique wall.

Robber’s Roost, Mount Charleston, Nevada

Mount Charleston has largely fallen out of favor—the 1990s style of tight, drilled finger pockets out blank swells like the Hood has lost its appeal. Plus, much better options have been developed on the Las Vegas limestone. But one Charleston area, Robber’s Roost, has gained traction as a sweet summer destination, both for its elevation (8,100-plus feet) and shady walls with climbs from 5.10 to 5.14d.

The Roost isn’t vast, with fewer than 60 climbs listed currently on Mountain Project, but the four walls described therein run the gamut from the area’s trademark technical face climbing on aesthetic, Euro-style blue-gray limestone to wild grottos like the Robbery Cave, where you can find upside-down 5.14+. The Robbery Wall is the main draw, with stacks of steep pitches from 5.11+ to 5.14a; just beware that it’s usually busy, with shared starts and linkups/extensions further clogging the pipes.

Maple Canyon, Utah

Maple Canyon, about 1.5 hours south of Salt Lake City, sits in an unprepossessing range of low, scrub-oak-covered mini-mountains. It can be a bit warm, dry, and dusty during summer, but Maple is i still a good estival zone, with an elevation of 6,000-plus feet, ample shade on the many walls, camping in a national-forest campground, and 600-plus cobbly clip-ups on the highly featured sandstone conglomerate.

Maple’s four standout destinations are the Box Canyon, the original sport area in the canyon and a tight, otherworldly corridor with lots of shade and steep, sandbaggy, bouldery routes; the Minimum Wall, an aesthetic panel of gently overhanging treadmill-style 5.11s and 5.12s; the Pipe Dream, a massive bowl with climbs from 5.11 to 5.14, many of which go on forever, with all the attendant kneebar-jessery and enduro tricks; and the Compound, high at the top of the canyon, a smaller, more wavelike Pipe Dream. But focusing only on those four zones misses the hundreds of other great routes all around, including some of America’s funnest moderates on appealing, dark-rock slabs with cool cobbles, anti-cobbles (i.e., pockets where the cobbles fell out), and hidden incuts.

Ten Sleep Canyon, Wyoming

Ten Sleep might be the big daddy of all summer-cragging zones, with cliffs across a wide range of elevations (5,500 to 9,500 feet) and hence variable temperatures, shade possible any time of day, free camping in the scenic Big Horn National Forest, lakes and streams to play in on rest days, and 1,000-plus routes on pocketed dolomite that climb as fun as they looks. It’s almost impossible to have a bad time here, and there are four-star classics at every grade, from 5.9 to 5.14+. Plug your fingers into one of Ten Sleep’s trademark sinker pockets, and you’ll be hooked for life.

The most popular area might be the French Cattle Ranch, with the perfect, streaked, side-by-side crags of the Shinto Wall, Grasshopper Wall, and Sector D’or et Bleu, but these merely scratch the surface; there are monster zones all over, with high concentrations of climbs to keep you busy all day. The pitches are long and sustained, the views down to the badlands out west and into the higher Big Horns up east are stunning, and the sequences are friendly for climbers of all heights and body types, with plentiful footholds and micro-crimp intermediates on the textured stone.

Wild Iris, Wyoming

For its scenic beauty alone, Wild Iris might be one of the best cliffs in the world. Here, eye-catching bands of white dolomite pop from a flower-studded, high-prairie ridge/plateau at 9,000 feet in the Wind Rivers, a wild sub-range of the Rockies so steep and remote it has more in common with Alaska than the Lower 48. The views at the Iris are expansive, with nothing but rock, thick aspen and pine forests, and lush meadows wherever you turn. It’s a subalpine dreamscape.

If you like technical pocket climbing, you’ll love Wild Iris, which has hundreds of climbs from 5.9 to 5.14 that follow one of two styles: either vertical and hyper-technical, with a cool head and steady footwork mandatory to decipher the cryptic sequences; and wickedly bulging, with long pulls to mouth-shaped solution holes, many of them shallower and tighter than you’d like. One of America’s earliest 5.14s, Throwin’ the Houlahan, is here, put up in 1991 by the late Todd Skinner, a driving force in developing the area along with other Lander locals.

[Also Read: Honnold’s Yosemite Partners Bailed. So He Smashed the ‘Salathé Wall’ Speed Solo Record.]

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