Margarine ridge trip report - Jenny's perspective
Saturday night: the drive to Mt Hay Road
Perhaps this was an indicator for the day to come. We set off late, faffed around at the gear cupboard, spent some time printing out topo's and then went over to Nicola/Vicky's place where they loaded us up with the important items that we were missing (alpine draws, #5 cam, hydrolyte), thank you!!! We arrived at the car park around midnight and rested up for the awaiting adventure.
Sunday morning: the wet walk-in.
At 6am I was woken up by my alarm (Henry) from deep sleep. We sorted through the gear, decided on how much water to bring (4l for me and 5 or 6l for Henry) and which rucksacks to take etc before setting off at 6:48am. Small side note, we had read about a rescue on Maragarine Ridge due to dehydration so wanted avoid a repeat of that situation! The walk can be summarised as wet, sketchy in places and in my opinion hard to get spot on. As per the route description we followed the Butterbox canyon exist, reversed the climb, followed the cliffline and headed down what we thought was the 2nd dry watercourse. We headed down the ankle rolling territory for a while with no sign of the start of a climb - the 15m visibility due to lingering fog in the valley didn't help matters at this stage. After a while we figured that there was no way the climb started any further down so started to walk back uphill in a vague direction that seemed about right, fortunately it was! I spotted the volleys hanging off a tree, we had made it to the start of the climb - only an hour or two later than we had anticipated, with soaking ropes, shoes and clothes.
Late Sunday morning: the climbing begins.
Grade 13 climb you say? Old school grade 13 I'd say. It took us a while to figure out P1, which was a short traverse with terrible gear, thin feet and slopers. I don't remember much about the next pitch apart from realising I had lost my sunnies and that the full heat of the sun was now upon us. For P3, the description says 'Rope drag on this pitch is a serious concern.' and I'd agree. Additionally, there was one slightly worrying point when the blue rope wasn't budging and we were too far away to communicate effectively, turns out the ropes were tangled down at the belay. On the whole we found rope management and rope drag with two single ropes pretty time consuming throughout the day, particularly for the small sections of vegetated walking/scrambling in between some of the pitches.
Sunday night: 3 pitches in the dark.
The sun set and we still had 3 pitches, including the chimney pitch for which 'Ridiculous rope drag is inevitable' and 'the second should exercise extreme care on this pitch, since a fall could blow the belay'. Excellent. Even better, I decided to put new batteries in my headtorch, which proceeded to overheat. Fortunately it still worked somewhat when I put the old batteries back in! Henry packed a poking stick in my backpack for the supposid bomer thread in the cave and I led the pitch at snails pace, using a different belay to the one suggested. By this point it was about 9.30pm and people were getting pretty worried about us because we hadn't logged our PLB or repsonded to any messages (sorry and thanks for looking out for us). Fortunately we had signal and were able to let them know the situation.
Midnight: Made it!
Henry led the final two pitches and then drove us back to Sydney (legend!). On our way home we reflected on how it was such a good adventure before I fell asleep, classic. There are many other small details throughout the day which I have left out of this report but will stick in my mind for a while.
For me that's what the outdoors and adventure are all about, awesome surroundings and incredible memories.