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Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
VIC Southwest	You Yangs	Nightfall Pinnacles Car Park	(General)	[ You Yangs Guide \| Images ]

Topic Date User

Heart of Darkness at the YouYangs 17-Dec-2015 At 1:49:46 PM Goshen

Message

Heart of Darkness, 24.

Is a great line (with a great name) on the front of the Nightfall pinnacle at the You Yangs. I'm not expecting anyone to know much about this climb; but you never know.

It's a Kevin Lindorff Route '85. I've been out to try it twice now, and absent any photos, let me describe it to you.

Forgetting for a moment where the bolt is, it takes the RH arete of the block, where hard moves lead into a great tenuous L leading groove, finishing up the L arete. Grade 24, at least.

When we start talking about gear, it gets tricky. There is an old rusty carrot (deformed, as you can't get bolt plate on it) about 1/3 the way up the climb - well before you actually get into the groove. It's impossible and unsafe to clip the bolt on route the way the climb is described, which leads me to think it was preclipped for the first ascent, and you climb in above the bolt. Rather cool and technical moves lead into the groove, which is followed with difficulty. You can pre-place some very marginal #2 RP's in this groove (forget about placing them on lead), and then you climb a nice arete to the top, facing a groundfall if they fail (as they probably would; the gear is SHIT).

In typical YY fashion, the bolt is placed high enough to protect the crux, stop you hitting the deck (maybe) while doing desperate grade 23 slabbing towards the top of the groove, and absolutely worthless at the top.

I really wanted to do this climb in it's original style - even happy to work on toprope, preplace all the shitty RP's etc; but not even sure I can bring myself to do that... It's just unsafe, and I've done a fair bit of thin runout climbing.

So if any climb warranted a retrobolt; this would be it. 2 bolts would be enough to protect this climb adequately, and enable the climb to be lead ground-up, with plenty of spice above and between bolts.

Anyone got an opinion on this? I'm happy to cop the line that it should be left for those with enough gumption; but I doubt it's had a second ascent, maybe one.

Also, I should mention that it's possible that I've misread the description and climb does start from the base of the outcrop. Maybe it could be possible to do that via a V7 boulder problem off the top of a cairn, and would be a good direct way to do the climb; but it would need to be bumped to 26 at least, even with an extra bolt or two.

Fire away!