My Good Acorn: Cape Spencer

Cape Spencer sits at the end of the road just beyond Saint John city limits. It's a beautiful spot for watching marine birds and mammals, and also a pretty cool spot to go bouldering. The rock type is difficult to categorize, I'm guessing it formed from some sort of volcanic interaction with the neighbouring sedimentary rocks, as it shares some granular crystalline properties of granite, and shows signs of shale-like layering. In any case, much of it is solid and featured.

In the intertidal (littoral) zone it is hard and can be smooth, or downright slick. Higher up, quality and is texture is more variable and can be quite abrasive in some places.

I first visited Cape Spencer in the winter about a dozen years ago, and that summer or the next a number of us spent the weekend putting up problems. We named many things and did draw out a topo, but didn't claim any of them as first ascents. Climbers and non-climbers alike had been going there for so long that surely most of the roughly 40 problems from that weekend had been done previously. We thought it'd be a handy reference to share. I have no idea what became of that one.

The next flurry of activity there was in 2007. A crowd of us spend a couple days establishing some harder lines and Fred and I attempted to re-record everything. I think he lost that copy, he thinks I did. Throughout the rest of that summer, Ben Blakney put up a bunch of hard problems, many of them at Ben's Beach. During the winter of 2009, the cliff above collapsed, burying much of it, but stacking some fresh blocks on top.

With the 2012 edition of Claw Your Way To The Top just around the corner, I think it's a good time to put together some sort of guide. Much of this is from memory, which is not perfect. I can only recall a small portion of what's there, and don't have photos for all of it either, so this is just a start for now. You can see it here, and I'll also create a tab at the top of the My Good Acorn blog.