Location: Round Table Pizza, 2065 Occidental Road, Santa Rosa
Time & Date: Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 @ 7:30 PM (Social hours and free beer for members at 6:30)
Directions: From Highway 101 at Santa Rosa go west on Highway 12 to Stony Point Road Exit. Go straight from the middle lane at the light onto Occidental Road. The Round Table Pizza is on the right just down the road.
Join Steve “Crusher” Bartlett on a tour of the spectacular, colorful climbs of the Colorado Plateau. The only thing better than succeeding on a great climb is to discover that said climb finishes atop a tiny summit, far in the sky. The desert of southern Utah and the Four Corners area holds hundreds of such wild summits, none easy to attain, many climbable only by difficult, seldom-ascended routes. Steve Bartlett has enjoyed 25 years of climbing these towers and has stood on top of over thirty previously unclimbed formations. For this show he presents highlights from these climbs.
Ever since 1982, when he quit his job in rainy, gray Britain, bought a one-way ticket in London and stepped out into the bright sun of California, Bartlett has been enjoying exploring and climbing all over the West. He has lived and worked in Boulder, Colorado, for the last 27 years.
The Colorado Plateau became his favorite place to explore and climb. The canyons and pinnacles are the most colorful and spectacular in the world–we in the western U.S. are privileged to have such beauty so close. The towers and pinnacles have drawn rock climbers for 50 years, and these climbers, Layton Kor, Harvey Carter, Bill Forrest, Chuck Pratt, Fred Beckey, Stevie Haston, Rob Pizem and many more, have left us a legacy of spectacular, difficult climbs.
Steve Bartlett’s contribution to this legacy is to have climbed over thirty previously unclimbed towers–none easy, some unrepeated after a decade or more–and to have recently written a book that tries to capture something of the flavor of the art of desert-tower climbing. Whatever the future holds for the desert, the history is now preserved in one coffee-table book.
