For thos
e missing the point here, Mt Buffalo is 1.5 hours from the NSW/Victoria border - in Victoria. As always, we managed to get away "late". I picked Dan up but with no food in the car we had to stop in at my local Woolworths on the way to the freeway. We were on the freeway by 7:31pm, meaning that the 1hr 30 minutes it takes me to get to Goulburn was too long to beat the 9pm sharp closing time of the bakery in Goulburn - which was shut when we arrived at 9:03pm. Damn it. We pressed on regardless, and after an HJ and petrol stop we arrived at the gorge hut at buffalo at 2:15am. We threw our sleeping bags on the concrete floor of the hut and I went out like a light.The theory was that we would awake at 6am and be racked up and heading down to the route by 7am. After slamming the alarm off and falling straight back to sleep, we awoke around 7:15am. We eventually got going and by the time we were standing underneath the unmissable line it was 9:41.
The first pitch was Dan's - a fist/hand crack that was just off vertical for 5m before it slabbed it up good for around 30m. I watched as Dan used both my #3 camalots and both #4s, managing to also get some #2s deep in the back of the crack where it "thinned". He belayed where the crack turned into a flake briefly, in and amongst some shrubs where the pitch was at it slabbiest. After battling with the first real crack climbing I'd done in a while I was soon at Dan's side - now battling the shrub for the gear attached to my harness as I tried passing for the lead.The second pitch was supposed to be 30m, a "lovely hand crack flake followed by 20m of offwidth crack". Well, after less than 10m the crack was over and I was staring up at another offwidth with another awkward start. I dived right in to a continuation of the excruciating pain in my feet and the final 3m showed me exactly how hard offwidthing can be.
By the time I made it to the belay point the outside of my left leg was scratched ankle to knee, both my feet were in agony and my sunglasses were wedged somewhere above the third piece of gear (to be successfully retrieved by Dan). I was ruing the offwidth crack and seriously wondering how to avoid another 100m of this kind of climbing. Dan followed - grunting, grovelling and cursing his way up behind me to land on the ledge. Even though his left ankle had been taped up there was still a large graze there with blood slowly trickling towards the top of his climbing shoe.
I past the gear on to Dan again for the mega-pitch. A short 3m corner, a 5m slab diagonally left to the start of a 30m offwidth - great, just what my feet wanted, being squished beyond the pain threshold again. He dispatched the slab quite easily, though that was what he had worried about the most. He started the grovelling process again. Up the offwidth. Around the tree, slung. More offwidthing, another tree, another sling. Still more offwidthing, still another tree, still another sling runner.
Finally he was above the last tree and had 6m until the crack became slabby enough to belay, however the crack now steepened to provide double the more vertical climbing I'd dealt with at the top of my pitch. So he set off. First started the grunting. Then a curse (almost inaudible under muffled sounds of pain). After a minute of not moving, there was some flurried activity, he rose 6 inches, then panting, more cursing, more muffled sounds of pain. This process continued for another10 or so minutes, inches being won in the vertical battle, until finally he whaled onto the slabbier part of the pitch and set up a belay. I then followed, I was at the start of the offwidth in a minute. I looked up and dreaded it. It was more horrible than the last two pitch combined and seemed almost as long!The fourth pitch provided some respite. Dan belayed between two steep slabs and what I was now facing was a 2m vertical section to more slabby goodness. The vertical section was quickly dispatched with a thin-hands jam and a solid hand jam over the lip. A high-step and I was firmly in the slabby crack. It thinned from hands to fingers (a welcome relief for my feet!) before petering out completely. Several metres below the top of this crack I had to slab 2m to my right to establish myself in another offwidth crack (not where we belayed, but where I slabbed between the two cracks - this is not us!). Luckily this offwidth crack soon narrowed down to fingers where a long reach (or another move) latched desperate fingers onto a jug and up to the belay. It was easier for me to lead and Dan also followed more easily this time.
The remaining climbing seemed to differ greatly in length and style to what was described in the route description we had. Certainly the "purity" of the line was now over, we'd done in 4 pitches what seems to be described as 5 in the book (about 140m of the crack line according to our topo). In the remaining 60-100m of climbing (it's hard to judge exactly how far we went due to the general disjointed blocks we climbed past) we came as close to face climbing as you can at Buffalo, some slabby cracks, some short cracks, some finger cracks, a bit of a slabby move here and there, and eventually we ploughed into Burston's Crevasse, much to our joy!I next checked the clock at 5.11pm, meaning it took us just over 8 hours to do the climb. While it was enjoyable now that the experience is over, I'm really dreading having to do climbing like that again. A bit of a problem given the amount of easier climbs at Buffalo that climb similarly...
