Fantastic day at Mt Buffalo yesterday with Leighton Modra! First we walked down the South side track to check out a couple of easy warm-ups on the Devilled Cream Buttress...only to arrive at the base and discover our planned routes are currently overgrown trenches, filled with trees, shrubs, grass and sticks! We quickly turned around and headed back to the hang-glider ramp & threw a warm-up lap on Banana Blasé instead (a rather slow lap due to me having a total brain fart, choosing pro that was 3 sizes too big for just about every single placement!). Upon arriving back at the car I inhaled two Mother Energy Drinks resulting a sudden burst of enthusiasm... Lets go do Backless!!! Im going to try and flash it! So, after getting down to the finishing ledge of Backless (Breathless & Coming up for Air finish here also), and throwing a rap line down the thing, I rapped in to brush some rather licheny handholds on the last 5m or so of the route. I then jugged back up to rack up before heading down again. Now, as I was absolutely shitting myself even thinking about the idea of falling, I spent a few minutes sussing out the gear placements, making sure I could get good gear straight off the belay AND before comitting to the crux! Leighton followed me down and we hung (literally) around at the belay doing the usual rope flaking shenanigans. Before long it was game-on... I nearly blew it straight off the belay when I couldnt get my balance quite right and was too nervous to fully weight on my feet, but then I dropped down a gear, breathed and looked into the challenge ahead. After around 15 minutes I topped out, absolutely shaking with adrenaline from nearly taking a decent whip from the crux onto a small wire, and let a Woohoo and a Hell yeeeahhh!!! ring out into the gorge! What an incredible route!! Possibly the best trad line Ive ever done!! (and my first grade 21 trad flash too!) Very proud!!! Thanks so much to Leighton for the awesome belay and encouragement! (...aaaand then I nearly plummeted off the ledge by clipping into the anchor to lean over and haul the rap line....only to discover at the last moment, in my crazy adrenaline fueled state, that I was in fact clipped into my plastic gear loop instead of my belay loop! Oopsy! :O
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 10:08:42 +0000
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