The Last Pillar at Cape Raoul

At 5.30am on Sunday the 30th of November a ragged bag of misfits; Jake "the snake" Bresnehan, Kim "office boy" Robinson, Doug "the bold and the beautiful" McConnell and Deano "rodriguez" Rollins, left Hobart for a day trip to Cape Raoul.

All of us had done Pole Dancer before, so the plan for the day was just to try and head out to the end of the Cape and have a little bo-peak at some rocks, and then maybe climb some of them. We were particularly interested in checking out the pillar at the end of the cape, and seeing if there was a route to do up there.

A bit of background info:

In the CCT Circulars there are a lot of old trip reports to Cape Raoul. On one such trip, the team went out along the ridge, right out to the base of the Last Pillar (it is about 15m high and starts from a wide ledge about 50m up). They realised that to get to the top, they would have to drill a bolt ladder (like they had previously done for one of the other pillars), and so did not do it. They thought that they weren't good enough to do it without bolts - and so they walked away.

So i suppose that they had hoped that any future parties would give the same consideration to that particular piece of rock (no bolt ladder just for the sake of aiding to the top). And ever since reading that, i too had always hoped that if someone went out to try it, that they too didn't put any bolts in it (not that there's anything wrong with bolts in general, especially at Cape Raoul) - just to respect the decision and efforts of the previous party.

That pillar has been just sitting there for sooooooo long.
Obviously, the best way to make sure no one goes out there and bolt it is to go out there and do it without bolts first!

The perfect day:

We made it to the far side of the Wedding Cake without any issues and were then about to head along and back up to the ridge to continue the involved scramble out to the end. But a spur of the moment decision saw us rapping off the western side of the ridge to the shore platform below. Within 10 minutes we were all standing in the sun at the base of the cliffs at the very end of the cape on an unusually calm day. After saying hi to a couple of seals we turned our attention to climbing rocks.

We ended up climbing from seal level at the end of the cape to the very top of the very last pillar - three pitches (18, 22, 24) and zero bolts. A bit of everything... squeeze chimneying, hand jamming, finger locking, and a bit of face and arête climbing to top it all off. There is even a cool gap to jump across on the scramble out as well.

Doug took the honours (first class!) up the final pillar - a mighty fine lead. In the end, all four of us were up there on top at the same time, each of us in shock at what had just happened...

Another line bites the dust!