It's been fairly wet weather lately so I haven't been able to climb much. There was a short period today at the end of the afternoon where enough drying happened before later rain. This gave me about 45 minutes of climbing.

Lately I've been mostly looking for routes that use some features of the wall in a way that's not super contrived. On a wall with a lot of features it's really easy to map out routes that just take some bunch of arbitrary holds and then call it a route. What's a little less easy is finding climbs that have some sort of character to them or something challenging.

One of the interesting features on the wall is the marks formed by the masonry work, specifically many of the stone blocks in these bluestone walls from the late 1800s in Melbourne have been made using the plug and feathers technique to split the blocks. On structures that were built for engineering reasons the masons didn't spend as much time cleaning up the faces of the stone since the purpose of these projects wasn't aesthetic. These masonry drill marks actually make for some really good climbing holds because they aren't super big and they are also numerous enough on this wall to make routes that only use these holds. Because the wall is really long there's quite a lot of these routes. I'm also really bad with naming climbs so I've taken to naming the routes after birds if they are vertical and flightless birds for horizontal traverses. This is a bit of a reference to the feathers bit from the plug and feathers masonry technique.

Today I found multiple new routes on the wall that actually have some appeal in a climbing sense, I took a number of photos and jotted down more notes in my notebook:

TODO: image