A small group of us decided to head to Ti Point for the weekend, a great crag just a few hours drive out of Auckland. After warming up in the sun on easy lead climbing at the Whiskey Delta Area, Jayden, Ben and I wanted to start a hard project and decided on one of Ti points best-rated climbs, ‘The Troll’ a 3-star grade 25 climb. As this was at the limit of our abilities for all three of us and with some very highly consequential fall risk, we decided to project this on toprope. Setting up this toprope provided a great opportunity to practice my trad climbing, by trad climbing a nice and easy crack climb to the right of The Troll I was able to set up a toprope anchor. After falling off more than half the moves on The Troll, multiple times, I was able to finally reach the top, obviously not a true ascent but a very good starting point for such a difficult project. Jayden and Ben also hopped on and made similar progress.
From here we decided to rappel down into the Amphitheater to climb Pegasus (23) and Polly International Terrorist (23), where I learned a valuable lesson to always check the end of the rope before pulling through the anchors. Thankfully I noticed my mistake before pulling too far and the knotted rope hung just next to the anchors of Polly International Terrorist. Ben quickly made it up on our spare rope and on his second attempt managed to red-point the climb and retrieve our rope.
