Climbing and Wining in the Grampians

About a week or so ago, I took a week off of work and Leanne and I made the one hour flight over to Melbourne to meet up with our friends Mike and Tammy McClure who were just arriving from Idaho for a two week climbing/sightseeing/wine-touring trip to the Grampians. The Grampians are a world class climbing destination, both for route climbing as well as bouldering, and we were exited to check it out with the added bonus of hanging out with some old friends.
Mike had unfortunately injured a finger just before coming down and was unable to do much climbing. However, this resulted in him having ample time to spend behind the camera, and the following photos are mostly courtesy of Mr. McClure. We had some rainy weather, but it was still a great time and we found that the bouldering lived up to its reputation of being absolutely amazing. The Hollow Mountain Cave is probably the most impressive climbable roof I’ve ever seen.

The mountains themselves aren't particularly high by US standards, but the surrounding flat topography gives them an added sense of height.

 
 
We also got to see a fair bit of wildlife that I’m sure most Aussies would consider mundane but were quite novel to us: emus, parrots, and kangaroos. We were hoping to see a koala but they unfortunately didn’t present themselves for inspection.

As for the bouldering, the sandstone was bullet hard and the problems were amazing. Here are a few photos of Leanne and Tammy climbing on some of the classics

I personally found the roof climbing the most fun and inspiring lines of the area. The Hollow Mountain Cave has a roof over 100ft long thats almost nearly horizontal and is about 4ft off the ground. There is some really cool movement, and some awesome holds (check out the left hand splitfinger pinch in the second photo...so cool). World class for sure




There was plenty of other smaller caves and overhanging features with beautiful lines on them as well and we manage to tour a good number of areas

 

One of the best problems I did there, and probably one of the best boulder problems I’ve ever done, was a V7 called the Nevin Rule. An excellent line.

We did run into some wet weather, but the Grampians also has a number of wineries, and as Tammy and Mike work a winery in Idaho (you can check them out at indiancreekwinery.com), we figured we’d do some wine touring while we were there.

There was also a local olive farm that we checked out that was pretty cool as well. Did I mention Mike and Tammy had rented a Wicked Camper Van? Actually not a bad option for the price and convenience...and it definitely gets people’s attention.

There were lots of fun aspects to the trip and I'll leave it to the following photos to help describe them. You can checkout more of Mike's photos, as well as his account of their trip, at climbidaho.com. I've posted a full list of the problems I did on 8a.nu, nothing too hard, but a good number of moderate problems for the short time we had that gave me a good feel of the place. I will be psyched to go back maybe in a bit better shape, and do some of the harder things I tried this time that were really good.

Next time I’ll either talk about some climbing and traveling we’ve done around Tasmania, or  about going out on a commercial tuna harvest to collect some research samples, I haven't decided yet. Until then-