Just home from a quick 12-day trip to New Zealand. Monique and I spent most of the time down in Fiordland (SW of the South Island), in the Darran Mountains/Milford Sound area. Call it a belated honeymoon if you like, but of course we were there to climb (and photograph). We weren’t planning to get on the longer, higher, alpine routes there this trip, it was too late in the season. We really wanted to check out some of the new sport climbing crags we’d been hearing so much about: The Chasm, Babylon and Little Babylon.
It was cold and wet some of the time, along with a pretty heavy dusting of snow, so we were happy to do all our climbing at Little Babylon, the newest crag, which is so steep it was completely unaffected by rain. We found the climbing on the featured fine-grained rock to be superb and the magical forest made it a great place to hang out. It’s a pretty hard crag though: the easiest routes are grade 23 or 24.
The pic above is of Bruce Dowrick on Jesus Built My Hotrod (27/28). Among other things I also got some shots of Derek Thatcher on his amazing looking 33 there, he is definitely climbing in top form. There was a great crew of Kiwis hanging out there with us; it is so good to see such a genuinely positive vibe. It would have been great to have had time to also climb (and photograph) on Babylon, a beautiful looking wall with routes up to three pitches long. You walk past this Babylon half way up the steep 30 minute hike up to Little Babylon and it sure looks great. But actually, I’m glad to have a lot more to go back for…
