June: climbing in Fingal

Didn't do at lot out of the ordinary in May. Definitely didn't take very many pictures, thus the lack of blogging activity. I've been trying to focus my attention on work recently and with the days so short it's been hard to get out and do much else after I get home (shooting climbing video doesn't work so well in the dark). Some things have paid off though, I just submitted a manuscript to the Public Library of Science for publication which if accepted will be my first publication of research for this PhD, and my 8th peer-reviewed publication overall. May not seem like a lot, but  each one is a lot of work in the making. I spend less time trying to climb a 5.14 at any rate. I've also been preparing for an upcoming trip back to Port Lincoln in July for what I hope to be my last time collecting samples. If everything goes well I'll have what I need to finish my research and it will just be a matter of hours in the lab and then writing it up. I don't' usually talk about my research as it's fairly complicated to communicate and much of the data, at least preliminarily, is confidential. However maybe one of these times I'll try to give an overview of what it is that I do the 5 days a week when I'm not rock climbing.....but not now.

This time, as usual, I will focus on those other two days a week in my life fondly referred to as the weekend. After my last post, I still was going out to my newly discovered Mersey cliffs and seeing what else could be developed. Unfortunately, the area isn't really that big and there isn't too many more things I want to do out there. I did a couple of traditionally protected lines on the lower tier, and cleaned up a couple of short powerful routes on the upper section but ran out of hangers to equip them with. Since my order of fresh bolting supplies has yet to arrive, those projects have been put on hold for the moment and I've turned my attention to Fingal.

There is a clean, slightly overhanging face on the massive Bare Rock escarpment (dubbed the boneyard) that I have been interested in. It has seen quite a bit of attention this last year and produced a good number of moderate to semi-hard lines. I'd been out there before, but at the time many of the routes had yet to be finished and the season was coming to an end so I didn't really get to try much. It's kind of a pain in the ass to get to, which is pretty much standard for any good climbing in Tasmania. In this instance you have to trudge up a steep hill for about 30 minutes, follow a sloping set of large ledges half way back down, then ascend a fixed 30' rope to gain a small crumbly ledge that you can traverses across to access the climbs. It's also often very hot if its at all sunny, but the redeeming feature is that you get some really nice views being 300' off the ground, and trundling blocks off the ledge is also pretty fun.  Over the past few weekends, I repeated a lot of what has been done so far (mostly in the 7b+ to 7c+ range) and also started trying 2 new harder projects, both probably around 8b+ in difficulty. This past weekend Gary Phillips also opened up a new route that clocks in at at a similar grade, which he's calling 'White Powder'. I've started trying this new route too, and have currently been alternating burns on all three of them. I shot some video this past weekend when Gary did his first ascent and was able to shoot some footage of Simon Young doing one of the area classics 'Too Fast, Too Furious' as well. Here's the video, although I'd have to say it's not my best effort. I still need to get used to the camera a bit more and my computer has a really hard time working with the HD footage, so until I can upgrade to a better processor its pretty much as good as I'm going to get it for now. Enjoy-


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKdxXQ5NN0c