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Crag & Route Beta

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Topic Date User

Wollondilly climbing 19-Aug-2013 At 11:40:47 AM sbm

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Bulti then led a bad vegetated pitch up and right to a ledge with trees. The gear was good though.

I then led the next pitch, which was two good looking twin cracks on actual rock up to the next ledge. The crack on the right turned out to be fused, and the crack on the left turned out to be no. 4 sized, and I only had one no 4. So it was a bit exiting laybacking up. Easy good climbing though. Looking at the description I'm pretty sure this was the second pitch of Odyssey.

From here there didn't look to be any good options. Either manky mossy blocks to the left (I think this is where Odyssey goes in hindsight), or trees and who knows what off around the right? Bulti decided to try and get on the right side of the buttress.

Having previously described his first lead as "the worst climbing I've ever done", he had to retract this for the next pitch, the "Heart Of Darkness". He went and disappeared into the maw of one of the filthiest vegetation-tunneling 'climbs' I've ever seen. Picture one of the Cerro Torre ice-mushroom tunnel pitches, but with trees and stinging nettle instead. And the climbing wasn't easy either, with tricky bulges that had to be overcome with mantles and standing on twigs.

He had trampled out a belay in a corner on the right-hand side of the buttress. When I got there I was a bit annoyed, as the next pitch actually looked good, so we had to continue.

I then led the best pitch of actual climbing, which was a good exposed corner up the right side of the buttress, on actual rock. A steep fist-jam crux led to a excellent belay ledge exposed right out on the middle of butress, now narrowed to a pillar. This was probably the 3rd pitch of Command Performace. We were now only about 15m from the top.

Bulti came up and congratulated me on the lead. I said "Thanks, now just get us out of here!" Above us, the pillar was blank and hard-looking. The easiest option seemed to be to traverse left into the gully, and try and find something there. Unfortunately, a rockfall has stripped the gully bare to dirt and choss.

Bulti stepped left, lassoed a big flake with a sling for pro, and then proceeded to trundle blocks for several minutes. I remember thinking "f---, I don't need to go to New Zealand to get killed by rockfall, I can do it right here!" Eventually he got cams into some blocks that didn't move, and climbed up and right. To get to the top of the pillar, he had to pull on a cam placed in between pillar, and the chockstone that bridged the pillar to the wall. Then he ran it out up hard unprotectable grass to finally get to a good tree.

I managed to free the move on second, it felt hard, and in hindsight I'm lucky I did as I would have had a nasty pendulum fall.

So despite all odds, we were at the top, in the sunshine and alive! And we even had about 3 hours of daylight left. Now we just had to work out how the hell to get down. Either rapping into unknown territory, or a blind steep bush bash in climbing shoes with no navigational aids.

We spotted a white PVC pipe, and what looked like a bolt on the next buttress south. There was no bolt, so the white pipe was probably some sort of survey marker. We decided to walk off to the north (climber's left of the buttress).

We walked straight down the back of the crag until we got to a fence. We turned left and followed the fence for a couple of hundred meters until we saw a small pile of scree on our left back up on the ridge. We scrambled up this, and saw we were past the northernmost buttress of the crag. We scrambled down the scree and steep vegetation. I think we went down into a gully right next to the buttress, and then headed diagonally back right to a huge sprawling fig tree, around right of the fig tree and then down.

The descent had gone perfectly, with no abseiling needed. I went and got the packs (more death landslide debris scrambling). Finally, we decided to skip the bushy ridge, and scrambled down talus fields and then open bush and meadows to emerge out at the creek about 10m from the car.

Sadly, Bulti left his camera on the roof of the car as we drove off! So we have no photos from on route, all we have are the few blurry shots I got on my phone. I personally believe this was the crag protecting its traditionalness.