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THE OFFICIAL PISSED OFF THREAD! 12-Sep-2009 At 8:36:22 PM daave

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I am Officially Pissed off that a friend and I planned to do Hotel California today but were completely DENIED!

Morning started off completely fine - had camped in the pierces pass carpark in preperation for the early start. Racked up and made the walk to the Mirrorball raps.

The wind on MIrrorball was SUPER strong! I have never climbed in wind so strong! I was fairly apprehensive as to how the rope chucking would go so we chucked them anyway.

After seeing the ropes fly horizontally further than they went vertically, we proceeded to rap down onto the pinnacle. The first rap was slow as there was much rope wrangling to be done but we both eventually made it safely to the midway anchor. We were slightly blessed with a break in the wind for 30 seconds inwhich we managed to pull the ropes for our second abseil.

The wind picked up again as we both made it to the bottom of the second rap. As Reas got off rope, we tried to pull the rope through. It made it freely for 2m after which it decided to get rightfully stuck! The overhands joining the two ends had got completely wedged in the V-groove between the pinnacle and main wall!

Both Reas and I spent 1.5 hours trying everything to get the rope free again - both of our body weights clipped in pulling/bouncing, flicking the ropes, pulling the other end - Nothing worked!

After much swearing we gave up and turned our efforts to the bush bash which lay before us. We had no idea where the path was, but I had a vague idea that one of the gullys must have a path. We ended up bush bashing for about 2 hours until we found a vague path which turned (thankfully) into the path leading up the the carpark.

Now that we were safely back at the car, we only had one problem - our double ropes were still stuck on the 2nd rap!

To cut a long story short, we decided it was too late in the day now to start the hotel at this time of year so we got the single rope from the car, re-rapped in, recovered the ropes (with difficulty I might add - they were well and truly stuck), then climbed back out.

Being completely over the situation, we went to Logan Brae for the afternoon.

Grose Valley - 1
Dave and Reas - 0