Jutting out of a flat plain and reflecting the evening sun with a golden-red glow, the outcrop of Hueco Tanks is a striking rock landmark. Its solid "mountains" are riddled with water- and wind- carved ravines and fractured into giant boulders. Hueco provides over one thousand problems including some of the hardest in the world, so unless you are the Swiss bouldering legend, longtime Hueco devotee Fred Nicole, you’ll never run out of things to try.

Bob Murray’s one-time testpieces established in the mid-1980s on the Mushroom Boulder (North Mountain) including the three "El Murrays" and the burly Mushroom Roof, plus John Sherman’s Sex After Death and Better Eat Your Wheaties [LINK TO VIDEO CLIP] (both in the East Spur region), are some of the most sought after problems for those pushing into the harder classics (V6 to V8/9). The sharp, crimpy, bullet-hard rock of these lines is characteristic of the finger ripping Hueco style – pull hard, bear the pain, and keep your feet on if you have to! Woman with a Hueco in Her Head (V10) [image sequence at right], in the center of the Mushroom Boulder takes this kind of climbing to an extreme.

Steeper doesn’t necessarily mean harder here: you just employ a different style to hang the "huecos" – those deep rounded holes sometimes lipped with sinker jugs but other times with slopers. Big overhangs are a Hueco specialty. The holds may be big, but the emphasis is still on upper-body strength, but especially on the longer lines, crafty kneebars, heel-toe cams and bicycling push-pull moves become the keys to success. If all the world had boulders this good there’d be no such thing as climbing ropes.

-- Wills Young

[LINK: See a clip of Lisa on Chbalanke (V12) here and Read Rock & Ice magazine’s news report about Lisa’s trip to Hueco HERE.]

Lisa on Woman With A Hueco in Her Head