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Vertigo (32/8b+) Australia's Hardest Trad Route 9-Mar-2020 At 2:25:18 PM IdratherbeclimbingM9

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On 6-Mar-2020 One Day Hero wrote:
>Yeah it was really nice bush up there, some of which had survived the 2003 fires.
>
>All the crags on Orroral Ridge plus Booroomba and Billy Billy burned quite late in the fire season after a military chopper landed in long grass and kicked things off. Bit of a pisser, it looked like the ACT would get through this summer unscathed but instead we had roughly half our routes burnt out two weeks before the rain arrived.

I saw the fires up there from a distance while they were happening and they were indeed spectacular.
Today I saw photos taken after those fires from the top of Booroomba looking back across the Hermes area, and was quite surprised at how unscathed the cliff vegetation was (relatively speaking), as I didn't think it would be anything other than scorched bleakness.

The same photographer also published pictures from Orroral Ridge showing bushfire-heat induced exfoliation of granite boulders that would render any bolts subjected to that treatment extremely suspect, but once again, despite the scorched earth in some areas, there were other pockets of vegetation that survived due the shielding effect from the fire by the same boulders.