Cavemen Cranking
The intrepid Climber Editor Mark Watson has sent some news in from the south. It appears that the Cave, Superbowl out of Christchurch is getting a fair amount of hard sendage recently. With Kaz Pucia and Ivan Vostinar cranking out the hard grades. Kaz sent a new route, Dracula (32) which is to the right of SpaceBoy (31). Not only does the super hard grading make this impressive, it was Kaz's first day back on the route after a two week lay off from an injury.
Kaz has been climbing for 27 years, and is definitely very strong right now. His send of Dracula was the first go of the day after warming up on it briefly and drying the damp holds.
Dracula follows Ivan's creation of another last week. Centrifuge (32), a long and strength sapping traverse line that starts at Super Glue (26), follows the She Devil traverse (28) to Gorilla Grip (28). It then follows the line of weakness further right with a crux right before meeting Bogus Machismo (29) near the lip of the cave. It has taken Ivan a lot of work and a methodical approach for this one.
The Cave is definitely NZ's hotbed of hard cranking right now, by the time the remaining projects have been cleaned up there will be over a dozen routes of 28 or harder there.
Will we be seeing NZ's first 33 soon ? With some super tough sending from Ivan, Kaz and Derek lately perhaps we will ...
Kaz has been climbing for 27 years, and is definitely very strong right now. His send of Dracula was the first go of the day after warming up on it briefly and drying the damp holds.
Dracula follows Ivan's creation of another last week. Centrifuge (32), a long and strength sapping traverse line that starts at Super Glue (26), follows the She Devil traverse (28) to Gorilla Grip (28). It then follows the line of weakness further right with a crux right before meeting Bogus Machismo (29) near the lip of the cave. It has taken Ivan a lot of work and a methodical approach for this one.
The Cave is definitely NZ's hotbed of hard cranking right now, by the time the remaining projects have been cleaned up there will be over a dozen routes of 28 or harder there.
Will we be seeing NZ's first 33 soon ? With some super tough sending from Ivan, Kaz and Derek lately perhaps we will ...