Don't look down

Cool shots....ahh the Camel! Some nice drops below you. Do you have any images of the vertiginous section to get to Roland Cave with a person moving along it to show scale? Anyone else?

Yep - that spot on the Mitre is certainly the crux of the Bell Traverse for me. A doddle in the dry but quite life-threatening with a layer of fresh powder on all the footholds, I can assure you!

Serious tribe wrote: Do you have any images of the vertiginous section to get to Roland Cave with a person moving along it to show scale? Anyone else?

This is the best shot I've got of the Roland's access ledge. The cave itself is behind me in the photo (we were leaving the cave in the morning).

Stijn wrote:

Serious tribe wrote: Do you have any images of the vertiginous section to get to Roland Cave with a person moving along it to show scale? Anyone else?

This is the best shot I've got of the Roland's access ledge. The cave itself is behind me in the photo (we were leaving the cave in the morning).

Hmmm.

Ice on them thaar rocks??

I also took a few pictures of the ledge to Roland's Cave, but it's quite difficult to show the drop off as you experience it walking on the ledge to the cave.

We arrived at Rolands in pouring rain, with a lot of running water on the ledge path, but this wasn't much of a problem.

These are two photos taken from the cave as we were leaving the next morning, quite similar to Intrepid's photo.





This one is similar to Stijn's, taken towards the cave.



Of course, being greeted with this view in the morning more than makes up for these occupational hazards.

A couple of pictures showing some of the exposure while leaving the cave and


one picture taken from one of the opposite Organ Pipes - showing the dropoff

That looks marginally intimidating!

Thanks for all the pictures!

One note on the Bt, Beuler and I did it last year and on the other side of bugger gully, the gully was full of very lose rock. This area can be somewhat precarious and if you do drop it will be a loooong drop. Our party decided to go down there one at a time, to reduce the change of anyone dislodging rocks onto anybody below him, as there is a lot of lose rocks in various sizes availble and you do not need to ba a clumsy Eland to dislodge them. I think another thing of the BT is that the exposure is more or less continious for a long while, so after the first ten minutes one adjust to it and get used to it.

Magnificent hike, dont be discouraged to walk it, but apply caution and you should be fine. For a novice it may be worthwhile to go with somebody who has done it before, even if it is just for the mental security. It was beuler's first trip in the berg and he did perfectly fine with his (at that time) firm Eland bulk and a heavy backpack.

That great, what a useful number of responses.

It certainly looks a lot worse in the image from the bottom looking up. From one of JH's images, which is the first one i saw of this cave, it seemed to me that there were only toe holds, but this looks actually quite safe. Although ther are one or two people that i still would not want to take along that path!

That section along the Bell's Traverse I have always found to be ok, and just a bit exciting. Although back in 91 on my first hiking trip, we almost had one of our party bale off that section. Which left us all a bit rattled.