Pigeon Cliff Rock Climbing

A great little roadside crag with everything form easy, to difficult sport and trad climbs. You’ll find everything from easily protected traditional routes great for beginners to some of the most brutally difficult traditional and mixed routes in Northern California. There’s even a good selection of moderate to difficult sport routes for those not looking to plug in gear.

Although this is a relatively small crag, there are enough routes of varying difficulty to keep almost any climber busy and pumped out of their minds for a day or two. So come and have a nice relaxing day building your skills and confidence placing gear or clipping bolts, or test your limits and skills against some of the harder traditional routes in the area.

Pigeon Cliffs is comprised of columnar basalt, which naturally forms some of the best splitter cracks, from finger tips to offwidths anywhere in the climbing world. Pigeon Cliff does not disappoint in this regard as most of it's routes are also vertical to overhanging, with several roof cracks, dihedrals and technical and aesthetic arêtes. Unfortunately, this particular plug of columnar basalt is rather limited in both it's height and width, but with over 60 routes from 5.8 to mid 5.13, and most being around 90ft tall, there is little to complain about when stopping by for a day or two, taking a quick detour on a road trip or being fortunate enough to have this nice little place for climbing in your own back yard.

Pigeon Cliff is basically the only local climbing gym, so most popular routes are conveniently equipped with top (lower off) anchors while the rest have rings, chain or some form of rappel top anchor. Most of the routes have had their gear upgraded or inspected recently and everything is kept in good condition. A far cry from what used to exist here up until about 2015. That’s not saying everything is bolted like a gym though. There are still some fairly sporty routes and/or routes which require some fiddly/techy gear. Especially the starts, which some may want to use a stick clip if leading. Many of the routes have easily accessible anchors for setting up top ropes or can be accessed fairly easily from a neighboring route. Which makes this a great and convenient place to set up a solo top rope to work your favorite project or get some good laps in.