Ascents in Tāhuna / Queenstown

Nice climbing throughout. Linked pitches 1 and 2.

All depends on how willing you are to get to this climb. Awesome backdrop and pretty good climbing. Route finding and bush bashing skills required. The approach was 5x harder than the climbing. Take heaps of water or drink heaps before the climb, you do cross a stream at one point. Wouldn't recommend on a hot summers day. Started too late, Had to bail at 5th pitch as we were running out of light. Got lost heading back down in the dark. Take gloves for bush bashing or you will regret it. From water tank follow slight trail, few rock cairns here and there, bush bashed through the last part, no trail imo. 23 feels more like 22 not sure Good luck

got a little of track . did third pitch as "Excursion" ended up a little harder than expected. slowed us down wanted to get out earlier so left the last pitch. Also last pitch didn't seem worth it. The Previous two before the last pitch were average at best. not a two start climb.

Only did the 2nd pitch after completing, Get up, Stand up. Super fun and exposed moves getting to the roof!

Unfortunately a lot of vegetation which detracted from the climb. If you go I would recommend taking a wire brush and making a day of it to clean it up. I was not aware of its current state otherwise would have done so myself. Not sure I will get the chance again before I go home. Would be a nice climb if cleaned properly. The second pitch is one of the scariest leads I have ever done. Thin and tricky gear the whole way. Had to sit a couple of times. Third pitch was the best in my opinion with great climbing and good gear, though a small amount of vegetation in the crack detracted from the quality.

Super cool tour, be careful with the descent.

Epic time, found the route thanks to notes from a friend and Eric's excellent navigation. Didn't climb fast enough to do the whole route, Pitch 2 was my favourite, varying from "this is the greatest climb of my life" as I went under the roof and round the corner, to 5 metres later "this is the worst route of my life" as I dropped Eric's carabiner while trying to navigate round the crack tree. Super hang dog on Pitch 4 for bolt / unrelenting section. Lots of debate about which way to go in Pitch 2 and 3 . Beautiful text book crack on start of Pitch 4.

Led first 4 pitches and turned back...

Wanted to jump on this for a while! Extremely runout (15m - 30m between pretty uninspiring placements).

Approach is pretty straightforward - as of 24/03/2024 there's a cairn on the second dry stream after the flat where you start bashing up the stream, and 4.5 hours from the car was pretty much bang on in the dark accounting for getting lost a bit and faffing around with the river crossing.

Only 1.5 hours up the stream to the first fixed rope. I probably wouldn't trust it after another Winter (pulling on it resulted in some pretty uninspiring sounds), and you probably shouldn't expect it to still be there (there's a very licheny 6m climb which you get to by following the cliff on your left to the very end).

The other two fixed ropes were gone (we found the remains of one of them), but its pretty cruisy scrambling anyway.

Kea Bivvy ledge is sweet, but bring a soft bottle because the water just trickles, and it's kinda hard to collect.

In general, the climbing was super run out, and a lot of it was wet and there's heaps of tussock pulling.

We got slightly off route looking at the topo and went directly up the face (instead of up the grassy gully which is described as a crack), and ended up linking the first pitch to somewhere in the middle of the third pitch at Grade 19/20 with a 40m runout. Went directly up to the middle of pitch 5 from here, at a more realistic 16/17.

Bit worried at this point because we hadn't seen any of the alleged "DBAs" but found a solitary bolt we reckon was the top of pitch 5 (no sign of the piton mentioned in the guide). Spent a couple of hours searching the ledge for the other "DBA" at the top of pitch 6 to confirm we were actually on the route but couldn't find it.

Eventually wandered up where we thought pitch 7 was and up pitch 8 (again, I think we got a bit off route, but had a cool 18ish pitch with some good pro, which was a novelty at that point).

Rapped down off the single bolt at the top of pitch 8 and set up a bollard to rap back to the ledge where we walked back to the top of pitch 5 and rapped off another single bolt.

Rap anchors look pretty traversey in the topo but they're actually straight down, and from the top of pitch 5 we did 2 30m abseils and a 55m to get back to our bivvy.

"DBAs" at the top of pitches seemed to mostly be single bolts, and we didn't find most of the ones mentioned in the guide. Rap stations sometimes had two bolts but didn't always have maillons/rings/biners on them.

If you go up take a few maillions and some tat as there are some pretty manky anchors. The one at the top of pitch one, has a loose nut which gets pulled out of the crack when loaded

Cool location, but probably won't be back for this route

Amazing route definitely soft for the grade (was our first tick on a 21. Very well protected especially on the last 2 pitches. Only used 3 small-mid range cams for the second pitch.

Easy climbing with rests everywhere. Not sure what warrants the three stars?

I can't think of a softer 25.