Ascents of Madagascar

The first pitch is nothing to speak about, so I strung it together with the second pitch. The rope drag was pretty bad by stringing these 2 traversing pitches together, but we managed to make it work & it saved us some time.

Cat had the honour of leading the 2 crux pitches. P3 and P5 both had some fun moves with a little tease of exposure, albeit well protected and with lots of potential solutions.

We were up at the crack of dawn for the ascent and it was already getting light when we were preparing at the bottom of the climb. Left the ground at 6am. Reached the top of P5 at ~7:50am. Our tactics of moving fast and light worked a treat. This wall is in the sun in the morning, it was just starting to get uncomfortably hot as we started the descent back to camp for breakfast. After 2 rappels we were back on the ground by 8:10am. Not bad.

Felt awesome to have all our systems go seamlessly and to just enjoy the climbing.

We borrowed an 80m rope for the rappel (70m is long enough).

Ashok's first multipitch climb. Rappelled in 3 pitches, which was unnecessary, as there is a rappel station ~8m below the anchor at the top of P3. Using a 70m rope, can get down in 2 rappels

better to bring 2 ropes, in case rope stuck on the way down