After being back for so long, I realised I haven't done any sharing about NZ climbing. Some of you guys might have heard me rave about the number of routes there and the slopers but I haven't really gone into the details or showed much pictures besides the ones I uploaded on Facebook.
I'm sorry to disappoint but I didn't climb much there due to many unforeseen circumstances so my experiences are pretty superficial and may not give a good overview of the climbing there but at least I'll try to provide a rough picture and sneak preview.
We climbed in 4 different places: a pretty big plastic gym housed in a warehouse in Christchurch city called The Roxx, the famed Castle Hill, Port Hills, a sport and trad climbing area near a city called Lyttleton and lastly Elephants Rocks, a bouldering place we chanced upon during our travels. Though it may seem like I've visited a lot of places, but we only climbed about 6 - 7 occasions at the Roxx, spent 3 - 4 days in Castle Hill, did only one climb at Port Hills and fooled around at Elephant Rocks for about an hour or so with no proper climbing gear so again, I have to emphasize my account may not be the best one and hopefully doesn't spoil anyone's impression.
Christchurch: The Roxx
I love this gym a lot a lot, more than Camp 5 and any other plastic gyms I've been to. It focuses a lot on high wall, so boulder lovers, expect some biasness for this section. I wrote a little more on this section cos I spent most time climbing here.
Routes: The routes are updated at a very impressive rate. Every 1 - 2 weeks, a few random new routes get put up. There are about 60 - 70 climbs? From 5s - 8a+; most routes are in the 6s range and about 10+ in the 7s range making Yi Xiong a happy man with plenty to project on. The routes were all pretty fun in general and some pretty unorthodox. Climbing up a slab just by compressing side wall to reach the 2nd bolt, suddenly turning 180degrees to press the wall at the back to go into a bridge, etc which was pretty creative. They're also quite generous with their volumes on the wall. So it was quite fun to climb and reach a huge volume, get the sian feel looking at it, then a mutre chiong, hold for dear life and carry on hopefully. It added a sense of dread and excitement for me.
Wall structure: One striking feature about the gym is the irregular random surfaces which provides unlimited possibilities. It provides a very 3D feel to each climb. Eg.: Mantling a huge volume that's placed on a slabby portion to get to a gaston that's on an overhanging piece of plywood to the side, something like that. It makes routes a whole lot more interesting as compared to SG gyms where the only variation or style you can add to a route is only by changing the holds. They've also got a 'natural'
rock wall that allows trad climbing which was not bad.
The next feature about the gym which was damn good was its evil insane bulging roof. It's so huge and the shape of it makes it damn fun to climb on. It really gave me a World Cup feel with the turn arounds, hooks above head, compressions and getting disoriented looking outwards all the time. Climbing to the top through the roof section adds up to about 25m.
People: Climbing is surprisingly popular in Christchurch, which I guess owes to publicity efforts by the gym management. They reached out to high schools and they have After School Programs catered to them. So very often, we see the gym flooded with school kids which was pretty heartening. The climbing community is also very supportive of their National Youth Team. We met these 2 youths that were going to compete in the Youth World Cups. I think funds was an issue so some climbers set up a booth in the gym selling candy to raise funds for them. If only our beloved SMF could go to the streets sell tissue paper for us... sob.
The anchors adopt a very different system which allows Top rope and lead. It's a huge anchor point with a permanent top rope set up and a U shape portion to put your rope through if you're leading. By having a top rope set up for every climb (minus the roof) meant more people would dare to try harder stuff. I see kids possibly 15 - 17yrs old, novice level trying 7c's. They get spanked eventually but their effort to jump on hard stuff was really commendable. So learning point here is: Don't get intimidated by grades. It's hard to go far, fast, if we stick to comfort zones. So next NM training, we'll be doing high wall on Enterprise without tiles.
Boulder!: (finally, sorry)
The boulder gym is pretty small with two prominent bulges as seen in the picture. They adopt a system similar to CA where they tape up routes from VE, VM, V0 up till V8+, but the interesting thing is that they allowed free use of footholds... as long they're screw ons. And I suspect the screw ons were purposely filed to make it slopey-ier. I thought this was a very good system to adopt which provides realism of natural climbing. Firstly, we usually don't use the same footholds on natural climbs, unless it's a crucial one, so what we step on that's to our comfort and confidence differ from people to people. Next, not only is it good training, it's realistic to expect the same shitty footholds on rock itself. It's hard to find nice big edgy rock to step on in reality.
Boulder routes were pretty fun especially on the flat wall cos I think they try to mimic routes from Castle Hill where climbs are really technical and balancy. The routes on the bulges were insanely hard? Maybe V10 - V12 with crazy bad tiles.
There was also a boulder comp which we couldn't join that was carnival style like Climb On. But. There was also a high ball boulder competition on the lead wall. The end of the route is at the 5th bolt. Exciting :)
Ok end of The Roxx. Oops a little long considering it's plastic. I'm usually anti-plastic.
Castle Hill
Ok to start off, the place is pretty huge with 3 major bouldering crags: Spittle Hill, Quantum Field and Flock Hill. We only climbed in Quantum Field and Spittle Hill cos it was more accessible. Flock Hill is mainly where all the hardcore stuff (Chris Sharma's project is there!) you often see in videos although Quantum Field and Spittle are more popular.
Although we spent only 3 days in Castle Hill, it was one of my most memorable climbing times. Travelling here by caravan, camping out in Castle Hill village, cooking our food in our caravan, washing up / bathing in a public toilet sink where waters were as cold as ice, waking up to the beautiful scenery of snow capped mountains, blessed to climb in perfect temperatures (10 - 12 degrees), sleep, repeat cycle. This was basically what we did over the 3 days.
Slightly unrelated to climbing, I thought I should give Castle Hill Village a mention.We see village we'll think of run down huts, rural states right? Guess NZ have different definitions from us. Their village is like an atas resort getaway with rich angmohs sitting in his damn furnished glass room using his MacBook for his design work. Firewood also isn't really cheap and we see firewood piled much higher than me outside a dude's house. The catch is, this place has no handphone reception. I thought it was really queer that such an atas place lacked the basic handphone reception and they have everything else. I have no idea where they get their food supply from too. The nearest settlement was pretty lousy and didn't have much food. The nearest supermarket would be at least 50 - 100km. It sure was a weird place to me.
Climbs!:
There are 15 areas in total for both Quantum Field and Spittle Hill, there are an average of 70 problems per area, thus, 70 x 15 = 1050 problems! One can spend an entire lifetime here just trying to finish all the routes.
Castle Hill does live up to its reputation for its technical climbs and slopers. The top outs were all equally evil, even if it is a V2. You can roughly imagine it as two overturned plates and pulling on them desperately. To make things worse, I thought the rock was very bad cos it was really polished after being climbed on a lot, very similar to Krabi, making top outs a hell lot harder and annoying with a lower coefficient of friction.
The routes were quite interesting in general, mainly big balls of slabs or flat wall, and never overhanging. An interesting fairly common feature were 'scopes' which are big depressions smack in the middle of a boulder, so it's usually mantle into the hole and continue again from there.
... to be continued. For now, I'll fill this post up with pictures.
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| The Classic |
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| The Classic |
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| The Submarine Boulder |
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| No such thing as jugs |
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| The Cyclops Boulder |
