Begehungen in Blue Mountains als Tick

A nice line up the corner of an amazing climbing location. Good gear pretty much whenever you need it, but not a crack climb.

The 3 trad pitches were excellent quality.

The sport exit pitch nearly killed us.

Rick pulled on a microwave-and-a-half-sized boulder as he was topping out, felt it move and instinctively let go.

The block was dislodged and we think it fell onto his lead rope below and sandwiched it between the two rock surfaces.

He then fell and the force on the rope causes the boulder to fall the rest of the way off the cliff and the forces at play shred (and what looks like melts!) the sheath between the two rocks. There's about 50 cm of exposed core. But, impressively, none of the strands have broken!

I hear "ROCK!" and faceplant against the cliff face and the rock magically falls past me and none of us are dead.

Climbed both routes up through cave a up the middle of the wall. Went right right at the bottom of the right variant and up. Fun climb.

Very nice warmup, the top felt a lot more controlled this time.

Super duper chimney climbing! First pitch goes on for ages and you settle into a beautiful rhythm that sounds rather heinous when explained verbally.

Good gear and very grippy rock makes for a pleasant ascent. The start is spooky until you commit to sitting down into the chinmey rather than trying to bridge the moves. Commit earlier!

Tess led what was supposed to be the grade 10 pitch and went completely off-route chasing after bolts (classic sport climber ) and ended up doing what I think must have been the 18 pitch of West Face of the Mirrorball

Seconding Monty on the FA. Not clean -I got too scared on second on the traverse crux at the start (given there was 35m of rope in the system) and aided off a bolt out to the arete. It then also took me a bit to figure out the mid-height crux.

A very cool mixed route, IMO. The start is a funky bit of traversing (who doesn't love a traverse crux, right?) and the face section is more varied face climbing.

Great day out. Pretty damn cold but not too bad in the end, glad I layered up! One ripped puffer jacket and one punctured foot but otherwise a smooth sailing. PS. Beware the first (70m) rap leaves you in open air. Be sure to kick against the wall so you've got enough swing to gain the ledge

Had to aid to bolt 3 after the rain. Super nice above that!

2 Laps - just to the last bolt (24 to here) clean, as the last moves were dripping wet. Managed to punch this one out, sans chalk, placing draws, no worries whatsoever. Pretty chuffed with this, given that I haven't steep climbed in the 7 months since my accident. My core and calves felt it the next morning, though!

This is my favourite of all the routes on the upper ledge.

2 x Repeat attempts, not clean. Though I cruiiiiiiised the link from above the lower layback crux to the top, for whatever reason, the low-crux kicked my arse today, and felt grades harder than 24.

The finale of this puppy is wild!

Another repeat. A great way to access the upper tier of climbing here.

3 fitness laps (not clean)

Warmup

Warm-up

Repeat. Rather stop-start, but the upper moves are my favourite of the crag.

Repeat. Absolutely cruised this. No way it was ever 23 (not sure what I was thinking?) Awesome technical climbing on weirdly good rock the whole way.

2 Laps. After a long morning working one of my upper mountains projects, this one felt hard today. Fun enough for what it is.