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Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
VIC Buffalo	Gorge	(General)	(General)	[ Gorge Guide ]

Topic Date User

North Wall descent 28-Oct-2014 At 8:44:25 AM DMWdesign

Message

On 27/06/2014 IdratherbeclimbingM9 wrote:

>Re a Trip Report; I for one would be interested to see how you go, and
>it may also help the wider readership if they get feedback on how useful
>you find the information you have gleaned from this site (especially updates
>on anything that may have changed), before/after embarking on your adventure.
.........

Thanks M9 for all your info about the route.

As planned, I did the trip a few days ago. - a great day out and the first three abseils were very exciting.
The whole area had a great atmosphere and the exposure was awesome.
We used 60m ropes and carried spare 50s. We also used basic walky-talkies which we found indispensable.

The route info given was accurate. We extended the first anchor as suggested. Not having been there before, it was a bit hard deciding on the correct line of the first abseil, but it was OK in the end. Someone had kindly secured a piece of carpet for edge protection at the first rap ledge. We scrambled down the last 20m of the last abseil on Comet Ramp and found the start of the climbers track relatively easily. The walk out was straightforward and track easy to follow.

We had a couple of bad luck dramas but these were successfully resolved and added to whole adventure. On the first abseil, at the rope retrieval, the end of the rope fell down and got firmly stuck around a flake (or fluke!) of rock about 15m up. I did eventually free it, but you’d be horrified if I told you how.

At the rope retrieval on the second abseil the rope fell down and decided to loop itself tightly around a small bush down to the left of an overhanging part of the cliff. – about 6m off the line of the rap. It probably would have pulled off during the abseil but after the first drama we did not want to take any chances. The work around was looping the abseil rope over a knob of rock at the far left end of the ledge. A bit of an awkward start, but this bought me down closer to the bush. When level with bush I locked off and was able to pull myself across on holds on the overhang and free the rope. After I was down, my mate retrieved the rope from the knob and abseiled directly from the bolts.

We checked out Dave Chitty’s (?) abseil point on the high point of Comet Ramp and next time I would probably abseil from there as the last two abseils in the gully are fairly uninspiring – although they do get you closer to the climbing track.

Thanks again for your help

awkward start on third abseil

rope snag (below right) on third abseil