Partys, Bikes and the You Yangs

Weekend of 10-11 October 1998

Location: Melbourne & the You Yangs

I stayed within 100km of Melbourne this weekend as we have finally started our aid training for Ozymandias @ Mt Buffalo.

On Friday night I went to a cocktail party at climber Nick's place. There were tonnes of climber/mtb/crazy dudes there and litres of drinkie things. I heard the figure of $1000 worth of grog floating around. Anyway it was fun meeting new people and creating toxic drinks from left over fruit juice tequilla and Bailys. The climax of the night came when at 3am Marcel (climber flatmate of Nick's) had an informal fire twirling demo. Instead of sticks he had twin chains with flaming ends. Dressed only in a pair of tights he amazed all with heroic twirling and twisting. He then manged to light the back of his pants on fire and everyone was screaming out but couldn't get near him because he kept twirling. Next he lit his hair on fire and this time he felt it! He now has a big bald patch right on the top of his head! It was all very amusing.

On Sat. I went crazy downhill MTBing with seven guys from South Aust who are friends of Nick that I met at the party. The track we did was 12km completely downhill and we clocked over 80kph on some parts of the track. Very fucking scary when the only protection we had was helmets. My new bike kicks arse! The track was at most parts about one car wide and fairly smooth. No big rocks or bumps, just really well groomed, very steep dirt with a few good hairpin bends. I did four laps of this mountain which is about the same hieght as Mt Maroon, in other words very big! We had serious truck runs happening, at one stage we managed to fit seven guys and four bikes into one car for the ride up!

On the aiding front our You Yang Sunday expidition was a great sucess. Paul and a NZ friend of his Harriet were my partners for this little adventure. I led up a 26 crack first which was A1 with great gear. Paul bought a set of etriers, a skyhook and hammer. I am still using my old crusty homemade shit. It works fine still! Paul's hammer is excellent for removing gear when you second (you have to remeber every piece gets weighted so without a hammer it would a super epic!

For Pauls first aid route I found a grade 24 with a flake start, two bolts on a face, a seam then an easy slab. He started up with me instructing on how to work the mess of gear. He quickly caught on and aided up to the top bolt. From there he couldn't reach the seam above so he pulled out his skyhook. (remeber this is his first aid ever). He found a very small edge wieghted it and tranfered his body wieght across onto it. It held. He placed a blind wire above and tested it... It blew and he fell back onto the skyhook which also blew off. He screamed down headfirst and landed 1m off the ground. Well that was fun for his first aid route! He got back on and managed to get an OK piece in above the hook and continue on. It started to rain and again faced with no decent gear he hooked two more moves at the end and made it to the top. I reckon it was solid A2 maybe harder! Impressive as his first aid route!

I then aided another 26 which was a A1 crack at the start (I even placed a few pitons!) then a very horrid 6m section of unprotectable offwidth. It would fit a #5 Camalot fine but instead I had to do three hook moves in a row then thrutch up the end chimney in my aid boots. Very very scary. We both felt really confident with our hooks. They work amazingly well and you can stuff around for ages on a tiny little granite flake. Anyway thats it for me for me at the moment.