Thy season beginneth

Just like Punxsutawny Phil, the Sydney groundhog has been a little shy about declaring summer to be over for the year. but the odd cool dry day has brought the boulderers out of hibernation. 

After a summer of trying to distract myself with surfing (let's just say I'm not a natural) it's nice to get back on to the blocs. A brief trip to Arnie's Acres and the Gramps was a great way to get the pistons firing on some fine-grained Victorian sandstone. As the man himself relays below, some classy first ascents were dug out from underneath the lichen near Wallaby rocks, along with some repeats of the quality steepness at the Cave of Man Hands (see topo in Vertical Life edition 1), the most notable of which was Dos Manos: an almost hroizontal 15-ish move gem with a gaston crux.

Around Sydney town I have been easing into things with ticks of a few obscure problems around the 8-9 mark including a sneaky ascent of this unnamed 9 at Jessicas between attempts on the slightly harder problem to it's right.

In other happenings, after much trigonometry and deliberation I have built a new board. It is nigh on 4m high complete with 6:1 pulley system to change the angle and can be set between 36 and 65 degrees. It is steadily being populated with hand-crafted desperately slippery holds including a collection of bespoke grips created and kindly donated by the folks at Beastmaker.

The new board

New holds in progress

All that's left to do now is put in a ridiculous number of hours of training on this thing then tick all my projects.