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General Climbing Discussion

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Sabre and Barrier Knob 16-Apr-2008 At 8:41:08 AM skink

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On 15/04/2008 nmonteith wrote:
>The very new Darrens guidebook (2007?) is already seriously out of date.

Nonsense - the guidebook is over 300 pages long and is a general guidebook for mountaineering, alpine rock climbing, ice climbing and sport climbing in the entire Darrans range. Only 20 pages (50% pictures) are focused on the sport climbing at the Chasm and Babylon - these may be considered out of date as the new upper-Babylon crag isn't in the guidebook, but the Chasm and lower Babylon are still more than adequately described. So describing the the book as seriously out of date is exaggeration except in the context of you going all the way to the Darrans to only climb at upper-Babylon. For any other Darrans trip it is a bible.

The few new routes at Chasm and Babylon are easily penciled in from the new routes book at Homer Hut (where most if not all Darrans climbers base themselves or at least swing by). The new routes up at the new upper-Babylon crag are also described in the Homer Hut book, many are still projects and the crag is probably not yet near saturation point, so no point getting it published yet. Also see http://darrans.wordpress.com/ for routes going up in the alpine.

One final thing to close out this rant - Darrans is spelt with two a's

We're kinda touchy when it comes to NZ's best rock - such a pity it has NZ's worst weather :o)