My friend and I decided to give Leaning Peak a go on Monday so I thought I would give a trip report a go.
We drove on Sunday night to bivy next to the cars, we both had a pretty bad nights sleep. Given that I may have been slightly hungover this came as a surprise
We started walking at 6:10 and we were probably huffing and puffing by 6:30. The walk in to the portals is a pretty good warm up with a few ups and downs. From there we rock hopped up to the waterfall about 1.5K before the junction, at this point we decided to do Short Leaning Ridge instead of Long... so we cut up to the right of the falls which was pretty steep and a bit scrambly but not too bad (pretty sure your supposed to go to the left of the falls). Everything went pretty smooth for the next couple of hours as we got higher and more exposed we really got to see the sheer harshness of the terrain, there is just SO much exposed rock and sharp ridges. As we got to about 11:30 we were feeling pretty tired and then we started to get t the rally steep exposed stuff. I'm not sure if we went the wrong way or if it supposed be that way but we go to a point were there was a section of about 30M of virtually vertical rock, Steve being the more experienced climber and wanting to test out his new 5-10 hybrid shoes went for the solo lead and I decided it was time to harness up. After a few more scramble/climbs we made it to the top by about 130. Stunning views all the way, especially the look of the Eagles Ridge decent. At this point were were pretty tired, low on water and mentally drained, we knew we only had a few ours of light left and started weighing up our options. We decided it best if we just go to the first saddle of Eagles then drop in to the creek on the north east, we figured w ecould just bash our way around the mountain and meet the Lower Portals track or a fire trail on the map.
With this decided we did the abseil of the back, it is a 25 meter drop, we had 40 meter of 8mm static so we had to down climb the last 5. Not too difficult, there was a bit to hold on too.
making our way to Eagles was a bit hard and involved another abseil, although not required just safer. By the time we got far enough down the creek to get water (moving at less that 1k an hr) we had 1.5 hrs of sunlight left and about 5-6 ks left. So on we pushed and out of luck an hr later the terrain cleared up and 30 minutes after dark we found the fire trail that took us back to the Lower Portal track and to the car at 6pm.
It was defiantly a big day and I'm still walking a bit funny, but all in all I would do it again it is just spectacular scenery.
- The prominent ridge on the right is Short Leaning Ridge
- Leaning Peak from afar
- Me Scrambling
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- Me starting the abseil down
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- Eagles Ridge, the creek to the bottom right is where we descended.
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Well I have never really written a trip report before so I hope it was readable. More importantly hopefully this shown up in Google for the next person researching it, as there isn't much info out there.
