Castor

There is a boulder, the size of a house, with one big, clean, flat face, just steeper than vertical, split by a fine, looming hand crack. The only thing tainting this incredibly clean, perfect crack is the stripe of guano coming out of it. I found nesting materials on top, though not an active nest.

Use the leaning boulder to gain the good jams. For most men with decently big hands, the jams will be utterly perfect for the first 5/6 of the crack's height. It gets a bit unnerving right at the top, where the jams get a bit fisty and the rock gets a bit more snap-happy. Please be careful.

A note on the name. On my first investigative attempt on this crack I pulled a skull out of a hand jam. The skull had belonged at one point to a beaver.

Castor

is the genus part of the Latin name of the beaver (

C. fiber

in Eurasia;

C. canadensis

in N. America), the great engineers of the natural world. I felt any name I would hang on this crack as a highball boulder problem should honor that creature whose remains I found in the crack.

Hiking upriver on the Riverside trail, after a mile or two keep your eyes peeled uphill for a massive downhill-sloping boulder with one big, slightly past vertical face which you will just barely be able to see is split by an utterly perfect, stuff-of-dreams hand crack.

Treat this thing as a short solo. I recommend padding the back-breaker rock directly beneath an imagined fall from the top. I also strongly discourage falling. Castor is a serious undertaking in a remote area. A fall from the top of this crack could break a leg or worse, a situation which a solo climber would be doing well to get out of alive.

One could rope up for this, in which case a #2 and a #3 Camalot would make it nice and safe. Belay options up top would be limited, though, and I have no intention of putting bolts up there. It's a boulder problem, and a fine, proud one at that. Jump off the opposite side. To my inspection, there is no other summit route on this boulder.