Urban Crag

It was an unusually quiet night at the Kangaroo Point cliffs last night. There was hardly any climbers around, most notably missing was the university climbing club which infamously can take up to 8 climbs along a given part of the cliff.  There were more crazy fitness boxing types than climbers. There was this one cave dude who ran up and down stairs and then flipped a big tyre a few metres and repeated the whole process. Would’ve been a lot easier to just roll it along Ug!

Despite the lack of other climbers at the park, our large group was quite rowdy with lots of trash talking, Nicole’s whining chatter (my ears are still ringing), Chris playing devils advocate, and more trash talking from all. Urban Crag has now a relatively large crew and its too long to name who came and those who didn’t. But one person notably missing was Fraser. We got an email at 5:30pm simply stating, “Should be there by 7″. Five minutes later, he followed it up with, “On second thoughts… My cars missing…Looks like I’m stuck in the western suburbs!!”.

For once we had a high ratio of ropes per climbers with Faz, Shane, Chris and my rope all setup as over Chubba Chip Mods (19), Robbie’s Robust Runners (21), Juice (20) and Wounded Knee (18). I’m a bit skeptical about the grades of these climbs, in particular Chubba Chip Mods and Robbie’s Robust Runners. The grades should be the other way around, CCM being a 21 and RRR a 19. Or maybe my busted finger is to blame.

Wounded Knee is an apt route name. I now sport 4 knee caps due to me banging both knees in succession of each other. Some of the crew would concurr too. If it wasn’t banged up knees, it was cuts and skin abrasions from CCM’s hard start. Dylan and Faz were able to nail the hard sections of CCM. Nicole had a bout of nevous giggles on parts of Wounded Knee. Belinda ate too many (like 5!) cookies before her ascent and thus was only able to climb a third of the way up. Brock was peeling rocks off the cliff and enjoying it. Shane the crane simply just reached up and topped over every time. Meanwhile, Chris argued with the rock but was it was no contest.

We had a couple of men of leisure along: Francis the Irish guy and Stu who really isn’t a newbie, but climbed with us for the first time.  Francis was prepared for a climb: jeans and sneakers, but his excuse was he didn’t want to be too shagged for a job interview the next day. Stu donned his helmet, and headbutted his way to the top of a couple of climbs. I think our belayers should be wearing helmets. We always seemed to be showered with rocks from above.