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Kaputar trip report 5-Oct-2011 At 12:58:52 AM vwills

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Where are the long weekend trip reports? Heres ours from Kaputar (kind of) though it doesnt involve the usual dawn to dusk tickfest that a trip with Neil entails:

I should have learnt by now that any trip planned with Neil is going to be drought breaking. Our cunning plan to escape the coastal low pressure system and forecast rain didn’t quite work. We headed inland to Kaputar expecting only isolated showers. However recent “climbing” holidays included precipitation on 16/18 days in New Zealand, 3/3 days in the Wolgan, 7/10 days in Tasmania and unseasonal, unsettled snowy weather in Peru, so I should have known better.

After an epic week of work Neil arrived at my place Friday evening, earlier than expected. I had just arrived back from a half day climbing further north (it was sunny!). After loading in enough bolting gear to grid bolt the Governor (just kidding) we headed off on the 6 hour trip to Kaputar. Around 1230 am we pulled into Dawsons springs camp ground to a starry sky and looked forward to some routes in the morning. One hour later rain lashed our tents.

At 8am it was still pouring. When it wasn’t raining it was snowing. The temperature never got over 3 degrees. Donning full shell wear we decided to walk around Mt Lindsey, keen to check out the 50m high orange wall I had looked at before. Tunnelling through wet vegetation, we made our way along the bottom of the cliff which has some promise, and some chossy rock. A few hundred metres along there is a “3 star” 21, which looks like a poor mans Blimp, along with a few bolted routes of uncertain provenance. Around the corner the exit gully was awash with a torrent of water cascading down making it impassable.
Further bush bashing saw us stumble on a cavern that would be a tourist attraction anywhere else but seemed very undisturbed. It was about 10 m deep and about 30 metres long and 1.2 metres high. Most importantly it was dry inside and with the radiant beam of an iphone we explored its recesses, but were disappointed not to find any bats. Further scrambling got us back to the rocky top of Mt Lindsey which was windblown and arctic. We looked for good places to rap from to inspect the most promising part of the wall, however the chill got the better of us and we decided cheese and tomato toasties on the free gas BBQs back in camp was more appealing.

After lunch we drove the 400m back to the car park (the weather is really foul you understand) and dithered about what to do. We could just go bushwalking, take out a rope and abseil the cliff, or instead, as any insane person might decide, do the Skyline traverse on Yulludinida. And so we drove down the mountain, set off at 230pm in heavy mist and showers to do a 1.8km grade 3 ridge scramble (about a 7km round trip).

We missed the first opportunity to get onto the ridge, as we couldn’t see it, but once the track came closer we scrambled up the wet rock onto the wind blown ridge and were promptly hammered with hail. Undeterred we headed south. “Summit or die”, cried Neil, “either way we win”. Either way, it was going to get uploaded to Facebook was my conclusion. There are in fact 3 summits on this traverse although at first it was hard seeing even the closest. The rock has reasonable friction, even when wet, though the covering lichen and dripping moss wasn’t so great. After about an hour the cloud lifted slightly and the mist swirled around us. It was quite atmospheric and provided you kept moving, not too frigid.
The ridge gets a little trickier towards the south summit, nothing too deadly, though a straddle move over a detached block on the narrowest part of the ridge was quite exciting. The cloud fortunately lifted enough to give us glimpses towards Narrabri, and the hope that we could get off the south summit and walk back to the saddle where we had got onto the ridge.
We descended, bush bashed and rock hopped our way back to the track, and were back at the car after 3 hours, just before dark. Even more snow lay on the ground back in camp and we spent a cool night in the undercover BBQ area with the other wet and miserable campers. The camp ground is great value, with hot showers, and the warm water was much appreciated to defrost my toes.

Sunday morning was misty and grim. Our fellow climbers from Newcastle packed it in, and we decided to as well after looking at the weather forecast, with plans of checking out Timor caves on the way back. However as we descended and passed the lower camp ground the ground appeared drier. We thought we would check out the Powerlines crag, as it was reportedly only 300m from the road.

The track to the crag doesn’t really exist anymore and we followed the fire trail by mistake, but managed to see a cliff line up to our left after walking some distance. A bit of bush bashing and we realised we were at the right hand end of the cliff where a few routes are. We crawled through the jungle in the mid section of the wall to get to the routes at the left end. The rock seemed dry, so we headed more directly to the car and got our gear. Neil led off on Roger Ramjet, a good old school 18 corner that turned into an offwidth for the last 5 metres, made the more exciting as our biggest cam with us was a #3. I then did the route to the left, Smithereens, which felt much easier to the modern climber though the rock wasn’t great.
Just left of the large fig growing up the wall was untapped potential and Neil placed a few bolts to link in with an unclimbed crack, and we had The Perfect Storm, a pleasant 21.
These weren’t the first hangers on this cliff as someone (does anyone know who?) had bolted a 3 bolt direct start to Cunning Stunts. I lead this which felt quite exciting as the gear wasn’t as bomber as it looked it should be up the crack. A newish chain was on top of this route, no doubt to cater for the volume of visitors!
The rain started again and the temperature was dropping from its maximum of 9 degrees, so we bailed, happy to have at least done some climbing.

We timed the run back to Newcastle well, mostly missing the heavy rain, and catching the last 10 minutes of the grand final at Terrys pizza in Gunnedah.

It obviously had dumped in Newcastle and with the odd shower about the wet weather option of the Buladelah cave was the only choice on Monday.
After picking up carelessly thrown rubbish from recent climbers, picking off leeches and weeding out lantana on the approach, we spent the rest of the day torturing ourselves on the sharp, steep rock. Neil foolishly had short pants and no knee pads, something he desperately needed on the aptly named Flesh Gordon.
After impaling his thumb on a spike and getting a core shot rope it was time to pack it in.

We did get quite a bit done despite the rain, Skyline Traverse is a classic, but maybe Autumn at Kaputar would be better.