RIFLE • Colorado is a well-known destination for rock climbing, boasting sites in Rocky Mountain and Black Canyon of the Gunnison national parks.

But there’s a smaller spot that is revered by climbers.

“At the top of that list, it’s Rifle Mountain Park,” said Grant Perdue, a Telluride-based climbing guide for Mountain Trip. “When you make the pilgrimage as a rock climber to Colorado, Rifle is going to be somewhere on that list.”

Rifle Mountain Park is recognized for offering some of the best limestone sport climbing in North America.

“Rifle is a destination that I was well aware of years before moving to Colorado,” Perdue said. “It has this kind of legendary lore to it being a place where you go to push yourself when it comes to hard, steep climbing.”

The canyon is home to around 500 climbing routes, said Lee Sheftel, a board member of the Rifle Climbers Coalition. Most of the climbs in the park range from 5.10-5.13 on the Yosemite Decimal System, which is used to measure the difficulty of climbs, Perdue said. The system rates climbs on a scale from 5.0 to 5.15.

“You see a sort of exponential rise in difficulty as you’re going through those ranks,” Perdue said. “The difference between 5.1 and 5.5 is going to be a lot less, physically speaking, than the difference between 5.12 and 5.14. Once you reach 5.10. You also get into these sub distinctions where you can have a, b, c.”

Rifle Mountain Park’s routes fall into the range considered hard, difficult and very difficult climbs. Currently, the hardest route at Rifle is 5.14c.

“This area is more challenging than any other area I have ever been to, because it’s not straightforward,” Sheftel said.

But that’s part of the draw.

“You definitely go to Rifle to push yourself when it comes to difficult climbing,” Perdue said. “It’s definitely a place that you go to build fitness and cut your teeth and push yourself, really throughout your entire climbing career.”

Part of why Rifle Mountain Park offers such challenging climbs is the makeup of the stone itself.

“This pretty wild limestone formation is characterized by these really steep, overhanging kind of amphitheater-style climbing routes and cliffs that line the entire canyon,” Perdue said. “There are a lot of beautiful kind of hanging rocky features that you’re ascending up through.”

Each of the cliffs have been bolted for the purpose of sports climbing, in which a climber connects their ropes to the bolts as they climb. One can often find Sheftel climbing routes he put up decades ago — the experienced climber estimates bolting 10 to 12 routes in the park.

“The rope is plan B when you’re sport climbing,” Perdue said. “You’re really focused on pushing your body physically to ascend these really steep faces.”

While the routes each have their own level of difficulty and grade, they also have some pretty fun names.

“All the walls have different reasons for why they’re named, as well as routes,” Sheftel said.

Take routes on the Anti-Phil Wall, for example. Named after climber Phillip Benningfield who broke his wrist while bolting the route in 1991, many of the wall’s routes have “Phil” puns: Phil of All Evil, Philibuster, Fullphilment and Land Phil.

“He did injure himself a couple of times, and so one day somebody walked up to him and said, ‘Boy, this was an anti-Phil wall,’ and so that’s how it got its name,” Sheftel said.

At an elevation of over 7,000 feet, climbing in the region peaks between spring and fall.

“Since it is a place where you go there to cut your teeth and push yourself physically on these really hard routes, temperatures … can stack up to be quite important,” Perdue said. “Having the friction that comes with a colder air temperature can be pretty critical on some of those lines. If you’re really trying to climb hard out there, it needs to be a bit colder.”

The park is owned by the city of Rifle, with many of the climbing routes maintained by the Rifle Climbers Coalition.

“Its world-class climbing with the types of rocks that are up there, so kind of unique in that way, and we’ve been on the cover of climbing magazine two or three times,” said Austin Rickstrew, director of Rifle Parks and Rec. “We see people from all across the country.”

The nonprofit coalition is run by a nine-member board and works in the park to keep the routes safe and up to date. The coalition accepts donations and is working on maintenance for an area affected by spring flooding.

In addition to maintaining current routes, the coalition’s board helps the city review and approve requests for new routes.

“They’re truly a helping hand in everything that happens up there,” Rickstrew said.

Nothing is required to go rock climbing at the park itself, aside from a $5 parking fee.

Outside of climbing, the park is also open to campers and picnickers. But, for climbers, it’s a slice of something special.

“Climbing, really, is a pointless endeavor at the end of the day aside from what it brings us on an individual and a community level,” Perdue said. “One of the most fun things I think you can do as a human is go rock climbing. It’s very intuitive, and at the same time, it’s something that we can make incredibly difficult depending on the lines that we’re choosing to climb.”