Devils Lake Centennial Climbing Challenge

How about we just admit that it's challenging enough to even find the motivation to climb at that illustrious pile of dung and move on.

sounds like someone has been shutdown at the lake before?

Ha! Easy for you to say Mike R.. You live in CO. Some folks hold DL to be great place to climb and most of us are simply happy to have this great resource for rock climbing here in the mid-wet-stern. Options would be pretty few and far between otherwise here in Wetsconsin.

Mike R. wrote:How about we just admit that it's challenging enough to even find the motivation to climb at that illustrious pile of dung and move on.

WRONG!!! Devil's Lake, in spite of it's lack of long routes, is as good as anything, anywhere.

I love "The Lake" I totally believe it is created to give those of us in the Midwest an awesome place to go climb and build strong relationships with others. I am going to tick off 100 trad leads this year. Thanks Mountain Project for the
new goal!

Correction: Thanks Hoofers Mountaineering for putting the challenge out there and Mountain Project for managing this great forum.

So we took Doug's idea and ran with it. Check out our first poster below. Registration officially begins July 4th. Send an email to the address on the poster and we'll give you a reminder when registration opens. In the meantime, keep track of your climbs. We've got some nice awards/raffle prizes lined up from our sponsors, and we are continuing to work on getting more.

First poster for DL Centennial Challenge.

Due to a massive finger injury, a new wife, and a new house I think I've been out 2 or 3 times in the last year, but still pretty sure I can bag 100 leads before December. Sign me up, I needed some motivation.

James, someone (i.e. maybe you) should make it a goal to climb 100 unnamed routes and add them to MP. This challenge can be whatever you need it to be!

Found my routes.

Use MP Route finder to help you pick em'

Route Finder link

At this point we are finalizing a rules/scoring/coupon booklet that all participants will receive. We've got coupons from Boulders, Adventure Rock, Wildside, Fontana, and we're working on a few more to round it out nicely.

On top of the coupon booklet all participants will receive an event t-shirt, which will be printed near the end of the registration period (July 4 thru Oct 31).

I mentioned the raffle prizes before. So far we've got an Osprey pack, Scarpa shoes, a Marmot jacket, and at least $150 worth of gift cards for the raffle. We will work with sponsors to add to this as the event unfolds.

We've got a nice scoresheet we are working on with dropdown menus and some nice score tallying features for everyone to download. Check out our event webpage for more info, and check back on the 4th to download registration info. All proceeds will go to Friends of Devil's Lake.

I guess I've done about 61 routes so far this year, over about 9 days. At this rate I need another 6 days - gotta be more disciplined about not repeating myself.

My lead list, 28 routes, is in need of serious work. I've heard a of couple of people (Burt, Nick) who are already passed 100 and are just improving their scores now.

Carl's tracking spreadsheet (see hoofermountaineering.org ) works pretty nicely (as long as you are doing named routes, and as long as they appear in the index of Swartling & Mayer). We count other routes, of course, it's just harder to build them into the spreadsheet. If any of you want to give Carl's spreadsheet a tweak, feel free to email me the results.

Registration is open!

Head to the Centennial Challenge webpage to download a registration form and liability waiver, and to find information about sponsors, prizes and rules.

Doug Hemken wrote:I guess I've done about 61 routes so far this year, over about 9 days. At this rate I need another 6 days - gotta be more disciplined about not repeating myself. My lead list, 28 routes, is in need of serious work. I've heard a of couple of people (Burt, Nick) who are already passed 100 and are just improving their scores now. Carl's tracking spreadsheet (see hoofermountaineering.org ) works pretty nicely (as long as you are doing named routes, and as long as they appear in the index of Swartling & Mayer). We count other routes, of course, it's just harder to build them into the spreadsheet. If any of you want to give Carl's spreadsheet a tweak, feel free to email me the results.

I quickly realized the limitation of that spreadsheet when Burt sent me his list. Tonight we'll discuss the best way to get all the unnamed routes into the scoresheet. They'll probably end up at the end of the drop-down lists as "Unnamed, Page XXX, route XXX." We'll get them in there, but there are easily 1500 unnamed routes in that book, so we need to figure out an efficient way to get it done.

So the 2011 Centennial Challenge was finally wrapped up 10 days ago with an awards ceremony and raffle drawing for the participants. Thanks to donations from participants and a great team of sponsors - Adventure Rock, Scarpa, Osprey, Marmot, Wildside, Fontana Sports, Boulders Climbing Gym, Vertical Endevors, Turners Gym, Moosejaw, Erehwon Mountain Outfitters, Riverwest Outdoors, the Chicago Mountaineering Club, Glass Nickel Pizza and Ale Asylum - we raised $500 for the Friends of Devils Lake.

Seven participants completed the challenge, with two completing in a pair of categories (TR and trad). Fourteen raffle prizes were given away to participants (including goodies like Scarpa shoes, Osprey pack, Marmot precip jacket, gift cards, gym memberships, pizza and beer).

Despite the fact that the challenge got rolling as late as mid-Summer, we are happy to have had a succesful event, with a nice check to hand over to the Friends of DL. And based on this success and the parterships that we've established with sponsors, we'd like to make this an annual event. We hope more of you will sign up for the 2012 Challenge.

Watch this spot for the official announcement ...

Oh yea, I will join this year for sure!

You can also check our Twitter or Facebook pages for updates. We've got last year's results posted along with other goodies.

I think Carl means to say "Check out our:

Facebook

Twitter

and Blog "

Is it going to be 101 routes this year (cause it should be)?

Dylan, yes it is! A couple centuries from now this will be a really hard challenge. But on the other hand, I suppose it's possible that mankind would have evolved into a species of free climbing gods by then ('cause you know nothing improves your odds of mating with opposite sex than sending 5.12s effortlessly).