“Living three hours from the best ice climbing venue in the southern hemisphere is like living around the corner from your favourite pub, you can't get enough!

We’ve been heading into the Darrans every other weekend for the last two months and have had some awesome times. We’ve established one new route in Macpherson Cirque leading to Talbot’s Ladder. The ridge just left of “Coumshingaun” gully is Midnight Cowboy (2+) involving some easy mixed climbing and frozen turf!

The other weekends have been relatively unproductive.

Wes started up a line left of “Actions Speak Loudest” on Psychopath Wall but the snow had insulated much of the terra firma from the freezing temps and there hadn’t been enough snow melt for the ice to fully reform.

We also summited Barrier Knob and visited Macpherson Cirque's main wall to find the lines not yet fully formed.

The precipitation this week hopefully has provided the mountains with enough juice to form a winter playground.

I totally had to front point up that first steep section of ice and my partner Gordon did a great job leading the second pitch with only five solid screws and a dodgy two ice axe belay.

Then I French styled it all the way to our bivy cave where we cooked dinner. We ran out of our gourmet ravioli, so for the second course we resorted to plan B, a fried can of red beans mixed with the last of the cocoa powder.

In the morning we waited until the sun touched our faces before cooking up a nice bacon and egg breakfast with crumpets, jam and percolated coffee.

Then we climbed another two pitches and realized it was getting too late to summit and we’d run out of chocolate biscuits, so we bailed at 2pm.

Our first two retreat anchors were off cams which we left behind. We quickly ran out of them, so had to resort to a pre placed bolt and sketchy V thread. I'm so glad I’m still alive, what an epic ...

The other weekend I was up 30 meters on sketchy terrain with a cosmetic warthog and a static load bearing bulldog 20 meters below. There was No Protection and the terrain was unconditional Grade 4.

It was a death defying learning experience and character building!

More to come …. Skelts.

PS. I was just floating around the net looking for a photo of Mt Tutoko's West Face when FTR popped up on Google. Your man Dice, the paraglider flew off the fucker in summer. I want to get the first winter ascent of the west face. Check out this photo I took of it a few weeks ago”.