Oman sport climbing gems discovered by Petit, Macadam, Ruscior

For the last decade Oman has been a popular destination for traditional multi-pitch rock climbing with some great walls of all difficulties and lengths. Some routes at Jebel Misht for instance are up to 1000m high! During the last 3 years, thanks in particular to Read Macadam, Oman has also developed into an excellent place for sport climbing and bouldering.

In January 2016 Read invited Alex Ruscior and myself to discover the place.  We first visited the Valley of Giants, an amazing place for bouldering where we wanted to climb a big wall, but on our arrival we discovered that the rock quality was so bad on the steep faces that we changed plans and focused on adding some short sport climbs to the huge boulders. There are now 10 routes between 6b to 8c, on superb rock.

Subsequently we returned to a place I had visited 8 years ago, Wadi Bani Khalid where we put up some great lines on superb featured rock, up to 30 meters high. Thanks to the support of our Czech friends Ondra Benes, Filip Martinek, David Michovsky and Jiri Lautner (who has just returned from a new big wall climb on Misht) there are now 7 lines between 7a to 8b+. More could come soon, as new routers should definitely visit this crag! This place is a perfect holidays destination, with great climbing and hot natural pools for swimming and relaxing afterwards.

I also had the pleasure to climb at Hadash and to meet the local Omani community. Developed by Read and Larry Michienzi, Hadash is currently the best place for hard sport climbing with some superb routes in the 7a-8b range.

Before concluding our trip, we repeated Shucran on Jebel Misht, a superb 1000m high 6b trad route first ascended in 2006 by Helmut Gargitter and Pauli Trenkwalder

by Arnaud Petit

INFO
Arnaud’s article on his website with some more photos: vagabondsdelaverticale.wordpress.com
Hadash sportclimbing: 27crags.com
Other sport crags in Oman - in french: climbing7.wordpress.com/
Climbing guidebook : "Climbing in Oman" with sport and multipiches