The next day Will, Harrie and Timmie planned to hike to Mount Tyndall and camp there for 4 nights in a rock cave. As I still had a bit time until I needed to be in Hobart, I joined them. Just as a reminder, the day before we had (again) late dinner. So, we aimed for an early start. You know, because we need to obviously climb the mountain. As such, we slept in, and then had a coffee. I mean, we need to be sure to have rested enough. But that also meant, we started sorting gear out and packing everything in all 4 backpacks by midday. Then we started Tullah in the afternoon. I left my car there, and Will took me the short distance to the car park to the start of the hike…which was another hour. So in late afternoon (you could fairly say, it was already early evening, we started our hike). The begin was quite muddy, but once we were on the ridge line that luckily became better. We followed the track to Lake Tyndall all the way up, but then we needed to branch off and find our way to the cave. That was when dusk settled in, and nobody really knew where the cave is either, as I found out just then. So, we just arrived before it became complete dark the cave. Lucky to us, there was nobody else occupying it, because for safety reasons we didn’t take a tent, as our backpacks were already heavy. We could’ve had bivvied, as it didn’t rain during the night, in the worst case. The cave was supposed to be for 6 people, but we had already a bit of trouble to fit 4 persons in. In particular, when it started drizzling at the 3rd day, it wasn’t that easy to keep all sleeping bags always dry. In the night native rats came by and looked after our food. That kept Will up for an hour or two. To pack everything together, hang it up high onto some cams. The rats came each night, and if you didn’t clean your cups or cutlery, they would chew through everything.
The next day Timmie was hot for climbing. So she went with Harry to check out one of those multi-pitch lines up from Lake Huntley. You still would need to abseil down first. Will and I took a more relaxed approach…coffee and enjoying the beautiful view. From our cave we could see all the way to Cradle mountain and Barn Bluff along the overland track. Will spotted a line he wanted to give it a try to climb. At this time I wasn’t really trained enough to do a trad lead climb. So, I was in general happy just to second. Thus, after dinner, in the later part of the afternoon, we started our reconnaissance walk on to the top of that hill on the other side of the valley, of what we thought is Mount Tyndall. It was a nice walk in the afternoon, with great views down to Huntley Lake, north to Lake Plimsoll (which is dammed by the Anthony river), and to the south to Lake Tyndall. We found even an easier traverse back, which is the approach to one of the multi-pitch climbs.
The next day we all went to that off-width crack. I mean I love off-width cracks, right. So, I let them give it a try. Will tried it first, but didn’t went over the crux. Harrie got over for the first pitch, and Timmie did the FA of the second pitch. I was swearing a bit on the crux of this off-width (it must be there where I started to love them). As Will was Will was the whole time talking about the build up of his “internal pressure”, we named the new route Internal Pressure.
The next day a front came through, and we were sitting in the cloud the whole day. That meant, we spent the morning in the sleeping bags and then went for a walk to the real summit of Mount Tyndall and Lake Tyndall in the afternoon. Views were great…I mean, at least for about 10m or so.
On our last day, Timmie and Harry, needed to drive all the way back to Launceston, as Harry needed to catch a flight, and Timmie the ferry the next day. So, that meant Will and I could finally climb something. But as we also didn’t want to end up at the cars too late, we decided to only do the last pitch of one of the routes. Good decision. The approach was easy. We even found the top anchor, and some bolts the way down. Will offered to abseil all the way down to the next anchor. Hmm, I thought alright, he seemed to be very confident. Typically, an abseil for half of the rope length should not take more than 5-10min. Well my dear friend Will missed the anchor dramatically, and ended up in a section of the wall without any bolts. So, long story short, it took him something like 40min in total, to prusik up again and find the right anchor. So, I went then down quickly. And I think it was only a very short pitch. So I think, I took me less than 10min to lead it, and put in the anchor on top.
To our surprise, Harry and Timmie were still in the cave when we returned. We started all together, but with Will’s knee issues downhill, they were much faster than we. I mean, I could have followed them, but it wouldn’t have made much sense, as I then would have needed to wait for Will anyway. Back in Tullah I said goodbye to Will, as he headed to Queenstown, and I just went up to Lake Mackintosh for the night, also a dammed lake for Tassie hydropower.
B' on Tour 