Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - Crag & Route Beta

Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
VIC Buffalo	(General)	(General)	(General)	[ Mt Buffalo Guide \| Images ]

Topic Date User

Where Angels Fear to Tread - bloody epic 5-Jan-2015 At 5:14:22 PM peteclimbs

Message

Jumped on WAFTT over the Christmas break. We certainly weren't disappointed. Some random observations for anyone thinking about getting on it.

Approach
We followed the instructions posted earlier in this thread by @gfdonc and they worked a treat. The path was well cairned and pretty easy to follow. I think it took us about 45 mins to walk down from the chalet and we weren't rushing.

The Climb
We broke it down as follows (I led P1 and P3)

P1 ~35m and belayed at a decent, comfy stance above a decent sized tree/bush in the crack. The start of the pitch felt hard. It's the most vertical climbing on the whole route and, combined with the initial shock of just how uncomfortable the jamming is, it came as a bit of a shock.

P2 ~60m with a semi hanging belay after the wide section.

P3 ~40m with belay at the top of the funky chimney thing (I went up it as I didn't realise you could go around to the right). It was bloody awkward with a small day pack on but for me the crux of that pitch is the climbing lower down where the crack disappears to nothing and you have a few feet of very thin climbing before you make the big ledge.

P4 ~40m with belay at another big ledge. Off width awkward corner thing followed by off width crack followed by fridge hugging. A real treat ;)

At this stage that's the end of the main climbing from what we could tell, and for us this is where the adventure really began. We hadn't previously explored the exit via Burston's Crevasse (BC) which turned out to be a mistake. From the ledge at the end of P4 we climbed 3 or 4 additional shortish pitches, each one getting more and more iffy as decent rock ran out and dirt and bushes took over. The beta we had read talked about going right form the end of the main climbing after the fridge hugging pitch. We did this but had it in our minds that we hadn't gone far enough to the right so as we got higher we were expecting BC to be on our right. Of course it's not, it's down and on your left. Unfortunately it took us an age to figure this out. The solution in the end was to call reinforcements and have the girls (who both decided to give WAFTT a miss - can't imagine why) who coo-eeed from the top of the crevasse.

In all it took about 6.5 hours to climb and about 4 hours to find our way to BC after the main climbing was done.

Other stuff:

We took 3 x #4 C4s and 2 x #3 and used them plenty. Maybe 3 x #4 was a bit of overkill but I'd certainly take 2. No need for a #5 IMO. I wouldn't worry with anything smaller than maybe 0.5.

We climbed on a nice cool summers day but still got through about 5 liters of water between us, admittedly the buggering around trying to find BC contributed a fair bit to the total time on rock.

We took two way radios. It wasn't an especially breezy day and we probably could have managed without them but it was nice to have. You also get decent Telstra coverage on the wall.

In general I think the climb is a bit of a sandbag. It's hard to separate the true difficultly of the climb from the general physicality/brutality of it. The granite is incredibly coarse and, as described by everyone else, shreds hands, forearms (it's deep) and feet, and this alone takes it out of you, but I also think individual bits of the climb are a grade or two harder than 17, the think part at the top of P3 for instance. We climbed Sultan and Maharaja on the same trip and both of those felt easier. I think if 17 was your limit then you'd find WAFTT to proper struggle. If you're up for a bit of an adventure though then it's a great day out.