攀登 of The Camel

Only the first 4 pitches, part of our epic getting back to the car from the base of mt banks.

Hard to put a quality rating on a route like this. The adventure value is excellent and the view from 200m above Pierces Pass is unreal but the choss factor is high, and every pitch is full value at the grade and often a tad grovelly (and the slab move on pitch 14 is heinously hard). We broke heaps of rock off involuntarily and kicked other stuff off by choice but i think the likelihood of it cleaning up in the way that BBB etc have is improbable. There are however a lot of bolts, retreat would not nearly be catastrophic and the trad is mostly very sane and in generally good rock, so most of the risks have been well considered and mitigated by the equipping team. That being said, this is still not a route for inexperienced trad climbers or those who haven't yet made friends with choss of all shapes and sizes. You need to have at least one pretty solid leader (who can climb 18 grovelly trad without too much fuss) in your party and also the ability to move quite quickly to get it all done! Ultimately though i had a great day out with Mitch going ground up on this monster, it was fun and scary and ridiculous and I am glad to have done it. Thanks heaps to Mikl, Jeff and Eugene for the effort that went into to establishing it! We were super psyched to charge up it after all the hard work had been done!

Logistics wise you can do most of the route in blocks of two linked pitches, we ultimately climbed it as 12 pitches and this allowed us to move quickly without having to rush the actual climbing aspect. The anchors are almost always bolts which makes changeover quick and easy, just make sure to reduce faff as much as possible. We left the car at Perrys at 5:23am i think and we were at the car at Mt. Banks at around 8:10pm having found that the walk from the top of the route to the car only took about 40 minutes (not including the detour to go climb Pitch 20, which took about an hour). We took a 70m rope, a double trad rack from BD #0.4 to #3 (this was helpful when it came to linking some pitches), approx. 18 quick draws with about half of them being alpines of various lengths (extensions were key to linking pitches too) and various belay/self arrest gear. We also had a set of wires but with the rack of cams we had i think we only placed two wires on the route, one of those being over an otherwise unclippable carrot.

We dropped a car at Mt. Banks the night before and then walked in from Perrys and that worked super well. If anyone wants more specific access details or general beta flick me a message!

A big day up Australia's newest big wall route.

Left the car at 5:23am from Perry's Lookdown and within 20 minutes of walking I rolled my ankle badly however we maintained a cracking pace to the O Tree and started climbing by 8am.

First 9 pitches climbed nicely and we were able link most pitches with our 67m rope.

passing the 11 o'clock pitch (P9) at 10:50am

Our pace then slowed on the next 5 pitches with a lil bit of excitement on the Pebble Pitch.

Finial 5 pitches I was feeling a bit worn down but we thrutched through them. (scary moment on P18 well above a bolt and a hold snapped on me )

Topped out and climbed pitch 20 on the way back to the car.

Outstanding views from P16 up

Car to car 14hrs and some change.

Thanks Will Vidler for putting up with my sub-par banter!

Cheer for all the effort of putting this line up! Michael Law Eugene Mak Jeffrey Crass

Also for reference the emergency bottles of water are still full

SO COOL!!