"Traverse of the Gods" Mt Banks

Last year a few people commented on one of my photos in the Training Forum from a sport climbing day. In the background was the impressive tiered face of Mt Banks, possibly the tallest cliff in Australia's Blue Mountains, depending on how you count. It's about 500m high.

We traversed it across the middle from right to left, using the second vegetated ledge.

Mt Banks was kind of the "First Great Problem" for Blue Mountains climbers in the 1950s, with the legendary Original Route requiring a few seasons of siege tactics and bivvies.

After that era it has been extremely rarely revisited by climbers. The muddy, black, chossy, and badly protected jungle mountaineering was abandoned for the sun-kissed orange jugs and clean splitter cracks found elsewhere. There are some  modern routes tackling cleaner unbroken sections, but the tallest Central Gully section has been mostly abandoned, too steep for walkers and too vegetated and chossy for climbers.

In 2015 a party from the Springwood Bushwalking club discovered a hidden ledge, that allows you to link an unlikely 3rd-class traverse horizontally across the whole face. This was nicknamed the "Traverse of the Gods".

We got together a party of 5 of fairly experienced Blue Mountains hikers and climbers. I was actually worried we had too much climbing ability, as we might go try forcing passage into more difficult free solo terrain instead of backing off and finding the proper hiker-friendly passage. (Spoiler alert - this happened)

To start off there's an easy 1 hour walk on a dirt road around the back. Then you do a short scramble down to the main ledge system and we were off.

100m of spectacular choss rose above us. Pure cheese held together by farts.

It was actually very vegetated and a bit of a scrub bash.

We did get a little lost just past Central Gully. There is an incredible entire "hanging forest" in the middle of the face, with a full canopy and no undergrowth, and no sense that there is 100s of meters of cliff above and below you. After walking around in the forest for a while and backtracking a couple of times, we found the right way out.

Finally we reached the crux, a very narrow and slippery ledge leading into the back of a chimney or steep canyon. From here you can slide out the other side via a hilarious bum slide.

And we were just about done. Logbook showed we were the 3rd party of 2024.

This photo shows something of the maze of ledges that make up the face.

It's an awesome route, but I worry that the crux ledge might get sketchier and more eroded as more parties go through, until a rope is truly required. It wasn't hard, but the mud and slipperiness made the exposed moves a bit serious.