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Crag & Route Beta

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Topic Date User

Candlestick route info 31-Mar-2015 At 11:00:30 PM sgodwin

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We climbed the original route on the Candlestick a few weeks ago. I hadn't seen this thread at the time, but I was able to get some useful beta from the forums on thesarvo. You can read the thread here:

http://www.thesarvo.com/confluence/display/thesarvo/2015/03/04/Candlestick+-+looking+for+beta

As Simon mentioned, the original route starts to the right, on a big ledge behind the totem pole. It follows a system of well protected chimneys for three pitches to arrive at the big ledge, then follows a series of cracks in good clean rock to the summit.

We fixed a 60m static to the bolts on the mainland, and climbed the route on double lead lines. I did the swim with one of the two lead lines and set up a tyrolean (gear anchor) to bring the other two members of our party across. The 60m rap line doesn't quite reach across to the ledge, so we tied it to the other lead line to tag it over.

There is a newish looking double bolt belay (rings) on a ledge at the top of pitch two of the original route. This is a couple of metres below the top of the tote, and roughly level with the rap anchors on the mainland. We tied off our tyrolean line here before continuing to the summit. We saw the sketchy looking abseil tat mentioned above, but we didn't use it because there are rap bolts about 20m to the right (when looking north across fortescue bay). The steel biners on these bolts were very rusty. We didn't trust them but the gates were too badly corroded to get them off. If someone feels like carrying a small hacksaw up there they could do some public service by replacing the rusty biners. We managed to get a couple of small wiregates through the hangers beside the dodgy biners and left them behind.

From the summit rap anchors you rap back to the big ledge, where there is another set of bolts with rusty biners. It would be possible (and maybe preferable) to tyrolean from here on a downwards angle back to the mainland, but we rapped down another 20m or so and used the new bolts that are sort of level with the mainland anchors. This works pretty well, but the rope rubs on an arete in a fairly alarming way, so some sort of edge protection is pretty essential.