Bouldering/trad

If anyone is interested, The Cavern by RNNP has invited myself and 1 other person to spend 4 days at their resort looking for bouldering sites and at the possibility of opening up some fairly easy trad routes on the crag near Cannibal Cave (in response to a comment I made on their Facebook page about how they should list trad and bouldering as activities at the resort).

So basically I am looking for someone with the experience and equipment to lead climb some prospective new trad routes on 2000m sandstone (probably C+ to D grade, but maybe as high as E/grade 12 - probably with lots of easy smearing) and to try out new bouldering sites with me. This will probably be in late November, but the date can be moved if necessary.

The person should preferably also be able to help in the grading of routes.

You can reply to this thread or inbox me if you're interested

Sounds good Ghaz. Just take care with that Drakensberg sandstone - the viability of (good) trad routes is very dependent on rock type and in general, Little Berg sandstone tends to be very crumbly and hence unclimbable (or unprotectable). Hence almost all the existing trad routes being in the basalt layer (which is dodgy enough as it is). Mnt_Tiska/Intrepid could perhaps correct me, but are there even any existing trad routes in the sandstone layer for this reason?

You're likely to find some great bouldering though!

The guy who runs my climbing gym gave me the same warning about Small Berg climbing. The resort is also not looking for anything risky, so I am mainly interested in non-vertical short climbs, but for the most part there isn't much in the way of features for protection (and obviously we can't bolt it - I wouldn't want to anyway). This photo shows the area I am most interested in (Cannibal Cave is to the left of this):


There are some cracks and some scrambles that may be doable, possibly even without ropes. Also bear in mind - at the end of the day I have to be able to do the climb, so it can't be remotely difficult I have been stuck on a grade 15 at my climbing gym for a few weeks now (the darn Lizzard move near the top of Hillary's Step a bit of an over-ambitious name for the 4th easiest route at the gym)...

intrepid wrote: Sounds good, don't think I'll make it though.

Due to not finding someone to go with this has been delayed till next year, so if you're keen for some time early next year, let me know