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Bungles Trip 6-Dec-2005 At 6:50:09 PM tokyo bill

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Hi all,

mikepatt sent me a pm to ask about our Bungles trip, and I thought I'd post a revised version of my reply to him and take the chance to say thanks to everyone else who chimed in with great beta - it really helped us out.

I'd been meaning to post up in any case, just to say that the trip was fantastic! We lost two climbing days to rain and one to stupidity, but got in five awesome routes.

The stupidity story is somewhat funny: On day three, we went out looking for the starts of Bastion Buttress and Flight of the Phoenix, planning to scope FofP and then climb BB as an introduction to Crater Mountain. Not being particularly bright, we ended up getting confused by Will Monk's access description and walking all the way to the far end of the cliff (what the heck is the "slippery slide" he kept talking about?). If you've been there, you'll understand how stupid this actually was. If not, just take my word for it.

By the time we realized our mistake and walked back, it was too late to climb. So we walked back to the hut, dropped the gear, put on our big packs, ignored our sore feet and walked down to the car. Rolled into Coonabarabran for beers and a pub meal and then carried enough beers and chips for the remainder of the trip back up by headlamp, with my partner Colin setting a blazing pace and just beating a major thunder and hail storm. We had VBs to drink every evening for the rest of the trip, so this particular cloud really did have a silver lining.

We climbed:

Day One: Out and Beyond. Well, not really. I led pitch 2 and I think I didn't traverse far enough right. After that, nothing really looked like the route description (much as we tried to convince ourselves otherwise), so we just followed the path of least resistance and topped out eventually.

Day Two: Cornerstone Rib. After O&B on day one, we wanted something where we could handle the routefinding! There was a nice new yellow flex friend stuck at the belay on pitch 1 that I guess the previous party gave up on. I used it in my anchor, then tried to extract it for a couple of minutes before following Col up pitch 2. I gave up, but it looks like someone with more patience could score it. Pitch 3 is just as much fun as everyone says - too bad it's not longer!

Day Three: Our inadvertent beer run.

Day Four: Bastion Buttress. After screwing up the previous day, we had to go back and get this one. Fun stuff all the way, but not really super memorable, except for the traverse around the nose of the buttress on pitch 2, which had my full attention for a minute or two.

Day Five: Lieben. My favorite of the trip - and I think Col's, too - such an nice, natural line. I ran pitches 4 and 5 together by mistake, accidentally poaching Col's lead of the supposed "crux" corner pitch, so he took the pitches immediately before and after the Green Haven, which I thought were both super nice. Great route! Pretty wet and slimy on the descent down Green Glacier, however, from various overnight rains. I was clutching at the ferns and wishing for my mommy on the first bit!

Day Six: This was a rainout. Did a lot of reading and eating. Almost managed a bit of climbing on the butter knife, but by the time we'd sorted out where we were the thunderstorms rolled in again and chased us back to the hut.

Day Seven: Flight of the Phoenix. Fantastic positions (and Col scored the hardest lead of the trip with a variation on pitch 2 that I'd say was probably a 20), but I felt like all the rope management work involved in the rappel after pitch 2, plus heavy rope drag from traversing around corners (I scored two pitches with traverses around corners) detracted a bit. A HUGE thunderstorm chased us off the summit, with rumbling and rain all across the western horizon. (We heard from the ranger the next day, while returning the hut key, that Coonabarabran actually had a power blackout for a while as a result of that storm.) We bolted out of there and practically ran back to Balor. I trotted down to the stream to grab the last couple of beers, and JUST as I got back up, the rain unleashed. We didn't get hit by a single drop. Can't beat that for timing!

Day Eight: The plan was to carry out and grab a couple of routes on Timor Rock before heading to showers and a restaurant in Dubbo before I had to fly out the following morning. It rained all night and into the morning, however, so we ended up giving up on the rock and heading straight for the showers. Ahhhh, man that felt good!

We saw no climbers and very few people all week - a few trail crew rangers (building stairs on the grand hightop trail) a few hikers and one pair of campers who must've had an interesting night in the cataclysmic thunderstorm that followed our climb of FofP. We had the hut to ourselves and plenty of tasty, clean water all week. We got heavy thunderstorms on several evenings, as noted, and toward the end of the week the water tank was actually overflowing.

It got pretty darn hot on the cliffs, though, when the sun was shining. I was using platypus water bottles, and got into the habit of carrying one in my hand and sucking down a liter on each approach, then carrying two more in my pack for the climbs themselves. This worked reasonably well. Col had a camelbak, however, and I was tempted to wring his neck and steal the thing on a few of the hot days, when I couldn't get to my bottles at hanging belays! May have to get one of those if we go back again...

All in all, an absolutely excellent trip.

Thanks again to everyone for your beta!

- Bill