Inner Mnweni Pinnacle Abseil Route

This weekend, Intrepid and I climbed the Inner Mnweni Pinnacle. We took the opportunity to bolt an abseil route for the peak.

A quick description of the route follows is as follows. Start at the neck between the Inner and Outer Pinnacles, and follow a gully/chimney for 4 pitches. Pitch 5 takes you up onto a shoulder overlooking a gendarme. Pitches 6-9 traverse across the face before climbing the skyline to summit. The traverse is not trivial.

Peckham and Van Tonder had a dodgy experience abseiling directly down towards the gendarme so conventional wisdom has been to reverse the route including re-climbing the traverse pitches in reverse.

With the benefits of bolts, a new abseil line has been created as follows:
From the summit, descend about 10m vertical down steep grassy slopes towards the neck to the gendarme that you reach at the end of pitch 4 of climbing. If you are lucky, a cairn will guide you towards a decent sized flat topped block. The first chains are located here.
1. Abseil about 40m, aiming slightly right (looking into the rock), towards the grassy ledge used for stance 5 of the climb. You are looking for a 1m long, 30cm deep ledge. The rope is difficult to pull, but you are in such a cool position you will not notice the dificulty.
2. Abseil 35m straight down onto the grassy ledge at the top of pitch 5.
Walk a few meters to the far side of the short, blocky pillar so that you are looking down at the neck forming stance 4 of the climb.
3. Abseil 53m down the gully, to stop at chains inside the chimney at the top of pitch 3 of the climb. Rope difficult to pull.
4. Abseil past the stance at the top of pitch 2. Shortly after this, move left (facing into the rock) onto slabs and ledges. If you get to the large flat chockstone mentioned in pitch 2 of the climb, you have gone too far down the chimney and need to get out quickly. At the very end of your 60m rope (double check the knots in the end), abseil off the ledge onto another small ledge 1m lower down.
5. Abseil about 35m to the neck and start of the climb.

Notes:
With shorter ropes, you could abseil from the blocky pillar to the neck and from there to the top of pitch 3 off a decent peg / fixed nut from yester-year. The ledges at the end of abseil 4 are big enough that you should be able to walk/scramble safely from the end of the shorter rope to the point where the final abseil starts.
The final abseil station only has bolts. Can the next person please take some mailons and then remove the tat we used directly off the bolts.



Inner Mnweni Pinnacle as viewed from the escarpment. The first arrow is the location of the top chains. The 2nd arrow is the location of the 3rd set of chain, on the grassy ledge at the top of pitch 5 of the climbing route. From here, abseil into the gully on the far side of the pinnacle, following the climbing route and aiming for the neck between Inner / Outer Mnweni Pinnacles.

Well done on the route Intrepid and AndrewP. Nice going!
I've not climbed either of the Pinnacles. To be honest, even looking at them gives me the creeps, especially when down in Pins Pass looking back up at them. I can't explain why because I didn't ever get that same sense from other free standers, either before or after.

How many bolts hold each of the chains? How deep are the bolts? How good are the bolts in the Berg basalt?

The actual plan was to do both pinnacles, we had another day available. But, I was too spooked after Inner to want to try Outer the following day. So, I completely understand your feelings. They are big, remote and the route guide has never given much confidence either.

The "chains" consist of a pair of 90mm long, 10mm diameter expansion bolts, with a standard climbing hanger. Attached to each hanger is a pair of mailons. An advantage of bolts is that I could find a solid piece of rock, away from cracks, flakes, drips and other weaknesses. It gave me comfort at least to know that the hole diameter is such that I really had to hammer away at the bolt to get it into the hole, and of course as soon as I started tightening the nut, the bolt expands more.

I have never done tests to know the actual strength of these bolts in berg rock. But, there is more steel in contact with the rock than a nut or cam placement. And the rock itself is more solid than the flakes, chockstones or blocks typically used for berg gear. So, the bolt is not as good as it might be in say Waterval Boven, but it will still be a lot better than just about anything you will otherwise get in the berg.

AndrewP wrote: But, I was too spooked after Inner to want to try Outer the following day.

Is it really that scary???

The route is longer than most in the berg, having 9 pitches. So you get a greater share of the usual grass pulling, questionable rock and tugging on 1cm diameter bushes.

But its the traverses at the end that really do it. Midway into them, you either have to reverse them ir go up. And the second last pitch has some route finding that has stumped other parties.

Added to that the simple knowledge that the effort to haul up the drill and all the bolts only helps once we have drilled the top 4 holes. If anything went wrong, its a 30kg pack up Rwanqa Pass for nothing.

I could go back tomorrow to climb something else, but did need a day or two to get over it.

I spent a lot of time staring at it on Saturday...it is such an epic looking peak, hope to get up it sooner rather than later.

Thanks for your efforts with the bolts, it really helps a lot getting up when you know you can safely get back down.

intrepid wrote: Second abseil:

The ropes look quite twisted in this photo. Was that the case or is it simply the photo being misleading?
If twisted, that surely would have made it difficult to retrieve the ropes after the rapp.
For me, last person down always had the unpleasant task of sticking his/her arm in between the ropes above the friction device to keep the ropes separated. Even then it was sometimes hard to get the ropes down.

The ropes do look twisted.

That abseil was easy to pull, I recall walking back on the ledge to get a better angle. Must have untwisted the ropes somewhere in whole process as well.

The tough pulls are just a case of the anchor being at the back of a ledge rather than the middle of a clean face.