As you can probably tell by the subject line of this email, a few of us decided NOT to go to Frog on Sunday. Instead, Ryan, Natalie, Simon and I, headed out to enjoy the pleasures of Mt Maroon to do Ruby of India, a five pitch, 200m, epic inducing, super fun happy climb.

After an 1 1/2 hour UPHILL walk in (which sucked), we arrived at the base of the climb. I very quickly learnt that choosing a thrutching, wiggling, bashing through undergrowth 1st pitch is not a good choice, when you haven't lead trad in a couple of months. After the 1st 10 m, it evened out into some beautiful face climbing.

That took us to the second pitch... let's see. The guidebook reads somethign to the extent of Traverse left until you reach the LLR. Don't go all the way to the ledge. Since none of us actually knew what an LLR was, we decided to go up and have a look. I led out (why am I so dumb?), and after 30m of traversing L, climbed up onto a ledge, looked at it, said to myself ' this isn't where the belay is supposed to be', climbed back down, and proceeded to attempt to climb an unprotected, chossy, exposed, vegetated, overhung chimney (did I miss anything?). 1/2 way up, I decided I was WAY out of my depth, and lowered off a cute li'l yellow alien with my heart in my mouth. Consequently, the 3rd, 4th and 5th pitches were left to the boys, and were finished off in quick succession, without mishap. Many congratulations to Ryan for pulling belays out of nowhere, when he ran out of rope on the 4th pitch, and many congratulations to

We topped out at dark, and proceeded to well, get lost. After much bushbashing, the trail was found, and we made it out by 9.00pm which was about 5 hours later than anticipated and resulted in Ryan and Natalie missing dinner with Natalie's parents (oops!). Oh well, much fun was had by all.

steff