In search of the new lost Waikanae Crag

Last year, rumors started to surface at Fergs that a new crag had been bolted near Waikanae, which was shortly followed by the whinges of seasoned climbers, ‘yeah right, a big long bush bash for crumbling greywacke.’ But then Christmas arrived and Santa delivered a guide to the Wellington Rock Climbing facebook group. See Waikanae crag details (thanks to Varun Venkatesh) and be sure read the full trip report below for important additional information. An email was sent out and 7 people willingly agreed to join the hunt for the new lost crag.

You can find the start of the walk in at 126 Huia Street, Waikanae . There’s no address there, but that will give you the google maps pinpoint location.

Walk about 10-15 minutes up the track until you hit the tree line, swing to your left and once you enter the trees start looking for pink triangles marking the trapping line (as a side note, when you come back this way, you’ll exit around PS23 or PS24). Continue 30-45 minutes following the pink markers. Just before hitting the forth creek bed, we broke off as suggested in the guide at PS8 and headed straight up the hill. We bumped into and began following another pink trapping line as it was easy travel, unfortunately in the wrong direction back to the right. We topped out and started to bush bash back through thick bush. At one point David was a metre in front of me and then he was gone. I called to him and he stuck his hand up, just 2 metres directly below me. Eventually we dropped in to the 4th creek bed where we were supposed to be. In the future, we should have continued a little further on the trap line to BSL23 and then gradually started to sidle up nearly paralleling the track. Only go as high as you need to get to easier off track travel. The base of the creek bed is overgrown, and you’re just sidling up and over that bush to drop in to the base of the creek bed. Ignore the tempting pink markers leading away from the creek bed.

Travel up the gravelly rocky stream bed about 15-25 minutes until the rocks become moss covered and hopefully you’ll run into our cairn near the base of the bluffs (the bathtub referred to in the guide is a large folded over piece of sheet metal which may or may not hang around). If you hit the cairn, look right and you should see blue prussic cord. It takes a bit to spot, so keep looking. Thanks to Varun, you can follow multiple blue prussic cord markers to the crag – keep looking for them, they are there. You’ll head up and then travel slightly back right paralleling the streambed til bumping into the base of the crag.

The crag has 3 sets of bolted anchors and a nice range of grades, 16, 19 and a soft 20. The rock is pretty decent and has been cleaned, but wear helmets as there are still some loose flakes and fair amount of small stuff that kept falling down. Belay spots are shaded, but the rock was not and it was hot – go early! Overall, nice routes and really well bolted. A nice change to get away from the usual Welly crags. Only 1.5 hour walk in which would have been shorter had we stayed low around the base of the ridge to the creekbed.

We followed up the climb, with an ice cream and swim at Waikanae – highly recommended!