Ascensões em Blue Mountains como Tick

Clean repeat on Will Vidler 's gear. Felt good to get this clean at the end of a big weekend, and had to give it some power-screams to succeed. So much steep fun.

Tough and sustained for 19 - certainly harder than Choc Chip Chai.

Clean to the bolt above the "Bryden Allen move" as a warmup, then lowered. Apart from the stupid runout between the 2nd and 3rd bolt, this all felt pretty chill, and super fun. I forgot how good this is.

Still classy

Always a pleasure

Warm up lap in approach shoes

One lap (not clean), messed up the crux section.

Fingerry as ever!

3 weeks ago, a proposition was laid down to climb the biggest route the mountains could offer us. Yesterday, that proposition inevitably led to a certain will-never-forget outing. Due to our lack of two cars allowing for the traditional Mt Banks approach from Perry’s lookdown, we opted to camp at the Pierces Pass Carpark. It was here that we left the car at 4.35am and walked down through the pass into the Grose Valley. We made good time, arriving at the presumed river crossing for the uphill bush slog by about 6am. Despite not being able to find any form of a track, the faint morning glow allowed us to admire Mt Banks and determine a direction to head for. This uphill battle for the ridge was anything but enjoyable, although morale was boosted when we surprisingly stumbled perfectly onto the base of the climb, albeit feeling critically juiced.

A quick break saw us setting off on the climb by 7.40am, with smooth sailing up into the eighth pitch. As I made the traverse to the start of the ninth pitch, it was looking like we’d breeze into the 11’o’clock pitch by the time target. But disaster struck when Ross dropped his only belay device. Although ‘skillfully’ he’d directed it straight onto a ledge somewhere on pitch 7. After lowering him down to retrieve it, we were back on track, departing the eighth belay at 11am on the dot. Less than an hour later, I’d say I experienced the finest moment of the day. This was watching Ross step off the edge of the world from the ninth belay and power up the choss scoop, with class, to our designated lunch spot.

The climbing proceeded and the sun joined us momentarily for some sandy slab and grovel. Pitch 14 saw me softly deck onto the ledge from ‘the move’. Upon pulling past this, it became apparent that I hadn’t brought any more carrot plates or even the set of wires up on this pitch. So, I wrapped a sling around a carrot and gingerly continued. Every pitch so far had seen both of us breaking ironstone footers left, right and centre… a fact that I reflected on as I saw the sling subsequently fall off the carrot below me. Willing myself to avoid yet another intimate encounter with the ledge below (only this time from more than twice as high up), I gained the final fixed hanger and gave a belay.

At this stage, we were well and truly marvelling at our height in the valley, soaring way above the rather small Pierces Pass in comparison. However, the wonder soon turned to gassing-out after choosing to link the offwidth pitch 16 and the seeping jungle bash of pitch 17. After, Ross set off on pitch 18, for which the face section had turned a little waterfallish. Pitching it out, he brought me up to the most horrid frozen, windy belay I think I have ever been on. Trying to get us off as fast as possible, I found I couldn’t climb the slab directly above. Confused and slightly concerned, I opted to step out over the void for the hanging crack of which is most definitely the route. It just looked too outrageous to comprehend at first. Freeing the initial moves up the crack on a blindly placed cam was an interesting experience. We topped out just before total darkness at 5:30pm… frozen, bloodied and sore.

At the top we discovered no track whatsoever and set off into extremely thick bush. This. Was. Horrendous. Eveeentually, we came upon the Mt Banks summit walking track and took a breather. From here, we pumped the Valley Uprising soundtrack and Led Zepplin, hitting somewhat of a walking flow state. Made it back to the car at 7:45pm. What a hell of a day!

Some good climbing moves on this. Good test for 18 and some. Highly recommend

Clean repeat. Lapping!

Clean repeat. Raaaaaad.

Clean repeat. A great warmup.

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.

2 shots. I had a pretty good (tenacious) onsight attempt, but the mid-height crux took me a bit to figure out.

On the second shot, I ended up linking from the initial traverse no-hands rest, to the top, through all 3 cruxes. I'll definitely come back for the true send, because this is a great climb!

Like the other routes here, this thing is quite continuous and sustained. Yet this one quite definitely has 2 thin and technical cruxes to keep it interesting.

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.