Hey everyone,

This is just a warning to others that might be wanting to go for a quick scramble up Lion's Head. As you may have read from the news article (http://climbing.co.za/news_detail.asp?newsid=1998) my brother Craig pulled off rather a large chunk of Lion's Head yesterday morning, while we were doing a quick route before work. It happened on the last pitch of "Wailing wall" (i am not joking about the name!), an easish F2 (15) route, which is on the sandstone, just to the left of White Face on the North Eastern side of Lion's Head.

I led the pitch and fortunately didn't pull on this particular horn. Craig wasn't so lucky and came down with it ,and it landed on his foot as the ropes caught him. It left a horribly gory mess of his toes (he was lucky it wasn't more of his foot!)

This piece of rock was big enough to probably not have been noticed to be loose, even with a fairly close inspection. So, just be warned, there is most likely more big loose stuff up there. We certainly will be a whole lot more careful and circumspect about the rock up there from now on.

A big thank you to the guys from Metro, AMS, and High Angle for getting my boet off the belay ledge without fuss and further trauma! We are very fortunate to have these guys around!

Safe climbing!

Thanks for the update, wish your brother a speedy recovery

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Climb ZA - Administrator

Hi guys

I am glad Shawn has made this incident known, my girlfriend and i spend a lot of our time on the Lions Head (Camps Bay side) Sandstone and we have had some "interesting moments" with bad rock as well. There's not much one can do about it, part of the "game" i dare to say but its good to alert others thinking of doing routes that there are some undesirable pieces of rock up there. Trusting your brother makes a speedy recovery, its such a great place to climb if you are in Cape Town.