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The new Blue Mountains guidebook 11-Apr-2007 At 3:27:39 PM Onsight

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On 11/04/2007 nmonteith wrote:
>SimonC, why was the Rain Cave removed form this guide? I was quite keen
>to visit it due to the
>constant rain over the weekend! Is it still accessible?

Yes, still accessible. Well, we decided to best way to radically improve the guidebook was to start pretty much from scratch. This meant that without still being working on this guidebook 12 months from now, it simply wasn’t possible to cover all of the areas with the thoroughness and accuracy desired. So we decided to put the effort into doing a better job of those areas that we did cover, and working on adding some important new areas not already in any recent guidebook. Rain Cave is covered in the last edition so the info is still around for those who really want it. There have been no changes at Rain Cave since the last edition, however the area is really a part of the larger Gardens of Stone area which is seeing some changes at the moment, so I’d prefer to get all the new info and do a good job of it to including it all in the next edition (unless there’s a reason not to include it).

On 11/04/2007 nmonteith wrote:
>...and on another note, i was mighty confused visiting several crags in
>the Bluies with chalked grades at
>the base that bore no resemblance to a) this new guidebook or b) reality.
>I'm sure the locals must be
>amused at the awesome sandbagging, but it was pretty annoying for us!!
>(a certain '21' at the left side of
>Bardens comes to mind - actual grade 24)

Not really sure what to say Neil, there’s no accounting for some things that happen around this neck of the woods! I hope the guidebook grade was more accurate. Many of us made a real effort to keep the bollocks, sandbagging and deliberate under-grading out of the guidebook. Some things may have slipped though however. For example I noticed that Paddington went in as 24, it’s not, that is a mistake which I thought we’d picked up and corrected yet somehow slipped through in the end. Such things are pretty trivial in the scheme of things though. Check out the Katoomba, Narrow Neck, Boyce, Piddo, York, Pierces and Cosmic sections, for example, and compare them to the pervious edition.