Lost in the Grose

Hi everyone!

After an early start from Sydney on Saturday morning, Andrew Duckworth and I headed out to the Blueys for what we hoped would be a cruisy day on Proteus, a big grade 15 climb near Pierce's Pass (on the northern side of the Grose Valley). Although I'd expected a massive walk in, the walk down was actually very pleasant, and after only 20 minutes we'd reached the base of the cliff.

Andrew and I then spent about an hour wandering about the bottom of the cliff, trying to work out where "Proteus" starts. We found the start of "Disco Biscuit 2000" (a grade 23 Mike Law climb), which has a square and an arrow scratched in the rock, but there are apparently no markings for Proteus. After humming and haaing for a while, we finally decided to head up a great looking jam crack about 25m right of "DB2000".

Andrew put on a fine performance up the crack, and despite sitting once, made it up to the first stance in fine form. From here he continued up a vegetated V groove which was almost as hard as the crack and extremely poorly protected down low. Near the top the corner opened up into an offwidth, and with almost no gear left, Andrew finally made it to the belay ledge. All in all the pitch was about 55m long, and seeing as one of our double ropes was only 50m long, there was some shouting and carrying on near the top of the pitch! Luckily my rope is 60m, so I just untied from the 9mm rope and Andrew ended up leading on a single 10.5mm for the last 5m.

The belay was cause for some concern, since the rock was of pretty poor quality, and there was almost no vegetation. Still, Andrew managed to piece together a belay off two hexes, a cam, a thread and a slung blackboy, and I gave it a good test while attempting to second the jam crack (I ended up pulling on a hex to get up the thing!). I gave the pitch a solid grade 18, with the crack the technical crux and the groove the psychological crux (and not much easier, technically, than the crack!).

From here we moved the belay 10m to the right, below a really nice looking face and corner. I headed up this, and although some of the rock was a bit crumbly (lots of thin ironstone edges), it was really quite clean and pleasant, with perfectly adequate protection. About 25m up I reached a 3 foot high shale break, and above it the corner was the size of a squeeze chimney, with no protection or face holds.

Now a more gutsy climber may have swallowed his fear and squirmed and fought his way up the chimney, but I chickened out, and, using my imagination, proceeded to crawl right 25m along the shale break. Now although there was a lot of loose rock in the break, and very little protection (2 very poor pieces over 25m), the actual wriggling itself wasn't too difficult, and although there was one slightly scary and very exposed section, it wasn't actually too bad. After thoroughly removing the skin from my knees and shins, I finally reached a sloping ledge, where I could set a belay and bring Andrew up (and across!). Call me weird (or a spelunker, which is perhaps the same thing!), but I actually quite enjoyed this pitch!!

With the trip clock (Andrew's somewhat dodgy watch) telling us it was 1:30pm, and about 200m of cliff still above us, we decided that we should start looking for avenues of retreat, so Andrew continued along the shale break (now a walk around ledge), over a huge loose block, through another crawl then into a corner, where a small but solid bollard offered a rap point. After thoroughly checking the rap point, I proceeded to rap 15m down to a large tree on a ledge below us. Andrew quickly joined me, where we set up a big double rope rap off the tree. I again led off, this time enjoying a slightly overhanging, 45m abseil back to the ground.

We then spent another hour wandering along the base of the cliff, checking out possible lines and trying to work out where "Proteus" really was. After much discussion, we decided that we'd actually started up the variant start to "Proteus", and that where we'd started our rightward traverse was probably just below where the variant links up with the original climb. We then walked out, and met up with a NPWS ranger, who gave us the correct time (5:00pm). I was very thankful that we'd bailed!

Once back at the carpark we walked out to Rigby Hill (which is where "Proteus" finishes), and sussed what we could see of the route from the top. This (combined with reading the guidebook a little better!) helped us to work out the top couple of pitches of the route, and memorise some landmarks that we had seen while on the cliff.

Despite not attaining the summit and becoming hopelessly lost, it was a great day out on the cliffs!