istepinyards wrote:Travel up the road to Horsham and get yourself into the Grampians. I am not one for the climby stuff but have a few school friends who were

definition of hell - being stuck for a week in an obscure rural victorian town for a wedding, within driving distance of the gramps but with no car and no time

given where you grew up I'd have thought the blue mountains would have been your 'local' (or the sydney sea cliffs )

DaveAldred wrote:A big study was done (can't remember if BMC in UK or somewhere in Europe) which showed age on it's own ha nothing to do with rope failure per se. It was damage over edges, significant abrasions and UV exposure that do the damage.

UV is the real big killer (well that an exposure to acids and solvents - don't store your rope hanging in the garage!), we actually recovered an interesting collection of abseil tat off temple butress years ago, ranging from slings that looks in really good nick thru to those that you wouldn't DREAM of ab'ing off. We pull tested the lot to failure on the civil eng test rig and got some really surprising results (stuff that looked good failed low, stuff that looked terrifying tested surprisingly high). Also got some cool high-speed photographs of a sling actually failing (you can actually see the fibres start to fail and the sling basically unwind itself)

j2hyde wrote:Nowra is closer to Kiama than the Bluies, and has a better selection of moderate routes.

there's moderates at Nowra? I always envisioned it as a bigger, badder version of the superbowl (i.e. 26's for warmups)