The trip started with a quick flight down to Christchurch then a shuttle to our home for the next two weeks, good old Cragiburn Camp site. As we heard later on in the trip, the drive through Arthurs Pass was meant to be one of the best drives in the country, this was not the case for us as we all ended sprawled out across the back seat sleeping for most of the way. I guess the old age is getting to us….
anyway we arrived at the camp site expecting to walk in to a whole bunch of climbers that we were hoping could give us a lift to the Hill later…This was also not the case for pretty much the whole trip. Lucky for Hitchhiking ae.
We decided to live with the food that we got from a Christchurch dairy, thanks to Easter making all the super markets being closed for the next few days because we just wanted to go climbing. The first few days were super fun as we just climbed everything and anything.The style of climbing here is totally different again so it was very fun to learn as some times you find your self falling of everything due to the insanely polished foot holds. Another super interesting factor was the grassy hills. You think climbing here was fun…. sliding down the hills on your pads was a whole other story. You would even get a bit of sliding action when you fall off the problems. You think the action is over as soon as you hit the pads but no, brace your self for a fun slide down the hill.
We woke up every morning, ate our breakfast and were out on the road as quickly as possible with our thumbs out. We relied on hitchhiking everyday to get to the Hill and back and to be fair we had a lot of luck with that. The longest we probably had to wait was almost three hours on a quiet saturday. The only down side of this was probably the fact that we would have to stop climbing by four or five to get back on the road to get back home. This meant we would miss out on the prime climbing conditions but to be fair we were pretty thrashed by that time of the day. So it wasn't that bad.
The climbing was amazing! Endless days of getting lost in the maze of boulders searching for that problem supposedly just just around the corner, but sometimes that corner never came. The good thing about this place was if you couldn't find the problem you're looking for you could just jump on anything around you and it is just as fun! we did a lot of out climbing mostly in Spittle Hill and Quantum field.This was mainly because we had no idea where any problems were at Flock Hill apart from the ones we remembered from the film 'Big Game'. (Sun Set Arete and Limestone Orgasm) This meant we only managed to make it up up there twice during the trip because we were too hooked on getting our projects at Spittle and Quantum. We really regretted this as on our last day we were taken up there by Jason Whitaker, who used to climb here all the time and knew a lot of the problems meaning we had our own personal guide showing us all the awesome problems. Our last day was super fun running around trying to send all these problems before having to go home, ripping our fingers to shreds in meantime.
FLOCK HILL
Sunset arete V8
psychic tea lady V8
Captain Contact V7
Limestone Orgasm V7
Grand Master Flash V7
SPITTLE HILL
Fierce Crimpy V9
Pandemonium V7
Quake sit start V7
QUANTUM FIELD
Snake Eyes V8
Pythagorus V8
That last day at Flock Hill showed me how amazing this place was, i will definitely be spending more time there in the future.
