Actually it's now called Begging for Beta. This is an awesome route on The Godfather Buttress at Umgeni. Steep pulls with some inobvious moves lead to the roof. Then, after clipping, comes the main course. Insert the most mind-boggling knee bar, and pull up on some really skinny crimps. Such unlikely moves. The headwall is rather less obvious than one would like, with tricky-to-see holds. Finally, to my embarrassment, a finger crack that I found hard.
Brilliant.
And what's more, this is merely yet another route in Roger's incomparable list of first ascents. And I mean incomparable. The rest of us are just pissing in the wind.
He and I played on his new project for an hour or so. Phew. I had my really small shoes on. They didn't suit the rock at all, although on the first few moves they worked well enough. I couldn't do the hard rock over, however. At that point the difficulty ratchets up a lot of notches. As Roger himself might say, it gets properly difficult. Some small crimps lead, with difficulty, to a very hard bit. This will involve using a small porthole through the thin sheet of rock covering the main part of the mountain and reaching an OK crimp and... Jeepers. I am not sure. It is steep and very thin indeed.
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| Something like "The Last Days of Gravity" |
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