Heavenly Hangtime

Storyteller Kirk on behalf of RipaRide

RipaRide Story https://www.riparide.com/stories/117-heavenly-hangtime

We finished our corporate working week on Friday and made our way down from Melbourne to Halls Gap. The 5 of us spent the first night drinking wine and discussing what hikes and routes we would climb for the long weekend. The first day we made our way to Hollow Mountain to climb the routes at Tribute and Amnesty. After a good 8hrs of climbing and hiking we made our way back to our accommodation and rewarded ourselves with some Indian cuisine at the restaurant across the road. The next morning we got up at 4:30am and headed to Mt William for sunrise, and we were in absolute awe.

We were back at the house by 7:30am to prepare ourselves for another big day of climbing. We met a few friends the previous day who suggested to climb in the dreamtime area. When we got there the more experienced guys set up to climb the 50m route whilst a few of us headed a bit further down to climb a pillar called ‘Prince Albert’. It had 3 climbs from easy to moderate, which gave us the warm up we needed.

Being a photographer this area was just so picturesque and a great place to take photos of all the others climbing, especially to capture the scale of some of those walls. After another big day we headed back to the house where we appreciated the clean warm showers before making our way to Reeds lookout to witness the last sunset for the weekend.

After sunset we got stuck into drinking more wine, eating cheese and watching rock climbing documentaries on Netflix and Youtube. The next morning we got up bright and early, the girls did some yoga then we enjoyed breakfast on the deck before packing up to have a free day in the Grampians then headed home due to the hot weather. Definitely the best 3 days I’ve had and experienced in this National Park, with the combination of modern, clean accommodation, the escape you need with hiking and the rush you feel with climbing, it was everything we needed.