Mt Barney - Short Leaning

Short Leaning is an excellent route up Mt Barney. But please note that it is a definite step up from the usual Barney scramble routes (Logans, Mezzanine) both in terms of difficulty and exposure. It also requires an abseil, so if you aren’t well versed in this, do not attempt this route.

Hike in as for Lower Portals. Just before reaching the actual Lower Portals swimming hole (after the Lower Portals campsite), take the obvious right fork in the track leading steep up hill (as for Barney Junction campsite). When you reach the top of the steep hill you will get a good a good view of Leaning Peak. Drop back down into the creek here and start rock hopping your way upstream.

After rocking hopping for a time, you will head up the steep slope on the left side side of the creek to take you to the top of Barney Waterfall. Short Leaning starts here.

At the top of Barney Waterfall, head towards the top of the ridge on the south side of the waterfall. You essentially follow this ridgeline all the way to the top of Leaning Peak.

There is one section where you need to leave the ridgeline by traversing east to gain access to some slabs. You will see on my wiki where we missed this traverse and had to back track a little. The slabs you are looking for have an obvious step down on their left side to another set of slabs towards the top. You want to be on the high side of the step (nice slab climbing). We made the mistake of trying to climb the slabs on the lower side of the step - don’t try to climb these, they get deceptively steep as they regain the ridgeline. We had to retreat off these using rope and head back to the slabs on the higher side of the step.

Once you’ve regained the ridgeline after the traverse, you just keep following it to the top. There are a few challenging scrambly sections with high exposure on the way to the summit.

To get off Leaning Peak, head over the top of the summit, following a track towards the south. Carefully descend a small distance until you find a double bolt rap anchor with a chain. We used a 60m rope to abseil to the ground from here.

Once you’ve completed the abseil there are many ways to descend off Barney. For this wiki, we went down North Ridge to Yellow Pinch car park and car shuffled back to the Lower Portals car park.