| Scoop Rocks & The Gallery, Grampians www.neilshaulbag.org 5/4/03 |
A perfect weekend of hard cranking was had by our group of seven keen climbers. We descended on Buandik Campground with the intent of some hard sport routes and some serious exploration. The Saturday saw myself, Kent, Jono and Tim Le head for Scoop Rocks where I continued my battle with my roof project. Kent showed awesome brute power by campassing through the opening moves. Inspired I tried his technique and low and behold I stuck the sloper! I laughed with joy and ran up the rest of the climb which includes a five metre ceiling on awesome bomber orange rock. Another great first ascent - Poison Bait (25). Jono and Tim led the fun trad Hunchback (17) on the Prow directly above Poison Cave. We then all went on a several hour bush bash looking for new routes. We found some amazing chossy caves, blank walls and lot of spiky bushes. A couple of things looked good - but they will be kept a secret until we can get back in there with a better track. A 1.5 hour bush bash will not be compatible with most punters! The afternoon was spent on Angry Arborist - the infamous reachy grade 23 with a full body dyno to a heuco. Kent performed well again - ticking its first onsight ascent. Jono and Tim decided it was too hard and bailed. In the fading light we snapped off some great photos and walked back to camp.
The next day we went with Vin and Rohan to the Gallery where they had been working Nictone (31) and Monkey Puzzle (28) respectively. In typical Gallery fashion we all got very pumped and took some nice whippers. The successful ascents of the day where – Kent did Chain of Fools (23), Vin did Monkey Puzzle and I did Gorilla Tactics (26). Roh got close to an ascent of Monkey Puzzle but sadly pumped out on the upper headwall.
