climbers from around the world, year after
year. In its seventh year, it’s grown into
Canada’s largest outdoor bouldering festival.
Since the beginning, Rock the Blocs has
been about getting the climbing community
together to enjoy the incredible bouldering
in The Fields, and the quality of the area’s
problems and the event itself have kept
people coming back. Attendance numbers
at the inaugural festival were around 70
participants, while last year’s event was well
over 400 attendees. The growth of Rock the
Blocs is very much a ref lection of the devel-
opment of The Boulderfields.
In 2014 and 2015 , Clayton Arnall’s films,
The Fields: A Bouldering Film and Out of the
Shadows showcased Okanagan bouldering
to a much larger audience. A number of the
region’s key developers were included and
clips of beautiful, inspiring and unknown
lines piqued the interest of climbers from
around the world. That year also marked
the creation of the Okanagan Bouldering
Society (obs). The same group of boulder-
ers who developed most of the lines in the
Okanagan Valley had the foresight to see
the potential of the region as a destination
and decided to create an official body that
could be a voice for the bouldering com-
munity in the valley. Since that time, the
obs has worked to have The Boulderfields
recognized as a provincial recreation site
and now has a partnership with the Rec
Sites and Trails B.C. to manage the newly
updated Boulderfields site. As a matter of
fact, this relationship helped the obs save
vehicle access to The Fields when it was
threatened over the past year. The obs
knew that the area was going to get popu-
lar, so they wanted to make sure the infra-
structure was already in place before that
occurred. The obs has also been the body
who has worked tirelessly over the last
four years to maintain, develop, and secure
access to bouldering areas in the Okanagan.
In 2018 , after many years of work,
my Okanagan Bouldering guidebook was
released. This beast of a project is about 540
pages in size and includes 1,80 0 problems
from throughout the Okanagan Valley.
The goal of this book was always to show-
case Okanagan bouldering as a whole and
share the incredible bouldering in the
region with those who were interested.
Local boulderers were a huge part of the
creation of this book, and their support
and excitement is always inspiring. As soon
as it was released, Okanagan Bouldering
sold like hotcakes and people were able to
access all the information for areas they had“OVER THE PAST DECADE,
THE BOULDERFIELDS
(AFFECTIONATELY NAMED
‘THE FIELDS’ BY LOCALS)
HAS EXPERIENCED A
DEVELOPMENT EXPLOSION
THAT INCLUDES A JUMP FROM
LESS THAN 100 ESTABLISHED
PROBLEMS TO WHAT IS
NOW, AT BEST GUESS, OVER
1,600 ESTABLISHED LINES.”
Pho
to^
An
dy^
Wh
ite