Vertical Life Issue One

#1 • AUTUMN 2012 • AU/NZ

Photo: Simon Carter

LEE COSSEY FIRST ASCENT OF SNEAKY SNAKE IN THE GRAMPIANS, VICTORIA. THENORTHFACE.COM.AU

PHOTO: KRISTOFFER ERICKSON

AUTUMN 2012

VISIT US ONLINE www.verticallifemag.com.au www.facebook.com/VerticalLifeMag www.twitter.com/VerticalLifeMag vimeo.com/verticallifemag Disclaimer

Rockclimbing and other activities described in this magazine can carry significant risk of injury or death. Undertake any rockclimbing or other outdoors activity only with proper instruction, supervision, equipment and training.

The publisher and its servants and agents have taken all reasonable care to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and the expertise of its writers. Any reader attempting any of the activities described in this publication does so at their own risk. Neither the publisher nor any of its servants or agents will be held liable for any loss or injury or damage resulting from any attempt to perform any of the activities described in this publication, nor be responsible for any person/s becoming lost when following any of the guides or maps contained herewith.

Alldescriptive and visual directions are a general guide only and not to be used as a sole source of information for navigation. Happy climbing.

Vertical Life is published quarterly Winter / Spring / Summer / Autumn Editorial correspondence Unit 3, 5-7 Mooltan Street, Travancore, Victoria 3032 Telephone 0417 295 495 Founders Simon Madden + Ross Taylor + Patrick Kinsella + Chris Ord + Terry Wogan + Heidi & Peter Hibberd Publishers Adventure Types Unit 3, 5-7 Mooltan St, Travancore, Victoria 3032 AU Editors Simon Madden + Ross Taylor ozeditor@verticallifemag.com.au NZ Editor Tom Hoyle nzeditor@verticallifemag.com.au Associate Editors Pat Kinsella + Chris Ord Advertising Terry Wogan terry@adventuretypes.com

Design The Bird Collective Heidi & Peter Hibberd info@thebirdcollective.com.au PO Box 80, Sassafras, Vic  3787 www.thebirdcollective.com.au Video Brett Williams www.sidetrip.com.au China correspondent + Training Guru Duncan Brown Senior contributors Steve Kelly, Andrea Hah, Michael Meadows Contributing writers Simon Young, Rob Baker, Daniel Lee, Matt Norgrove, Andy Lindblade Coffee consultant John Szabo Photography Heidi Hibberd, Simon Carter, Nick Fletcher, Daniel Lee, Rob Baker, Simon Young, Matt Scholes, James Morris, Chelsea Bruckhorst, Rich Crowder, Danny Uhlmann, John Palmer, Josh Windsor, Andy Lindblade, Rob Taylor, Robert Dun, John Szabo, Ross Taylor, Eben Farnworth, Mayan Smith-Gobat, Beau Kahler, Tom Hoyle

Cover Photograph John Palmer Proofer Chelsea Brunckhorst Web consultant Asia Pacific Disaster Recovery Technology Consultant Rookie of the Year, Mark Gould General Dogsbody Glenn Tempest Foundation Supporters Climbing Anchors www.climbinganchors.com.au Expedition Equipment www.expeditionequipment.com.au Frontier www.thefrontier.com.au Mountain Equipment www.mountainequipment.com.au Scotty Dog Resoles www.scottydog.com.au Sea to Summit www.seatosummit.com.au Spelean www.spelean.com.au The North Face www.thenorthface.com.au 5

CONT 08. EDITORS’ NOTE Psych 10. FOLIO James Morris 14. COLUMN Andrea Hah writes on Beginnings 18. FEATURE All Aboard the Ship of Fools Simon Young’s Pakistan adventure 32. FOLIO The Carter Files Words, video and photos from Simon Carter 38. HISTORY Climbing for Climbing’s Sake Michael Meadows 44. FEATURE Titan Free Ross Taylor climbs Mt Geryon in Tasmania

6

58. TOPO Take Your Vertical Horizontal at the Cave of Man Hands in the Grampians’ Victoria Range 60. INTERVIEW Mayan Smith-Gobat 66. FEATURE From China With Love, Petzl Roctrip 2011 Daniel Lee + Matt Norgrove 74. FEATURE China Uncovered Liming with Duncan Brown 79. FOLIO John Palmer’s New Zealand 82. FOLIO Nick Fletcher 84. FOLIO Tom Hoyle

ENTS 86. FEATURE Finding the Balance: Going Solo on Mt Kenya Rob Baker 92. COLUMN Steve Kelly asks RAD BAD or Just Plain Sad 94. TRAINING Duncan Brown shows you how to Get Your Strong On 100. NEW GEAR Bright Shiny Things 104. REVIEWS Books and films 107. REVIEWS Cafes and Climbing 108. INTERVIEW Get to the Point: We interview the author of the new Point Perp guide, Robert Dun 112. OBITUARY Athol Whimp

No, it’s not Middle Earth, although it isn’t far off, being New Zealand; James Field-Mitchell cutting loose on Crag Vultures (31), White Falls, Mt Ruapehu, North Island of New Zealand.

Josh Windsor 7

PSYC Psyched is a word climbers throw around all the time. Not that it is exclusively climber lingo but we don’t hear a lot of footballers saying, “Man, I was psyched to coathanger that guy, kick the goal then get a pat on the arse from my teammates,” or tennis players exhorting, “I was psyched to smash that forehand into Roger Federer’s smug Swiss face.” Maybe it’s just the X-gamesification of modern climbing.

Or maybe it’s because climbing can be so confronting that you often need to be supercharged to even leave the ground, particularly when it’s hard or scary, and especially so when it’s both.

Psych, though, doesn’t just mean excited. In the climber’s vernacular the word can operate as a substitute for motivation.

Whereas excited is like an acute state, motivation is a chronic one.

You have to be psyched to train all winter alone on a fingerboard in a dank hole. You have to be psyched to drive four hours to your ‘local’ crag every weekend to feed your appetite for the vertical. You have to be really psyched to suffer through the night bivvying on a big mountain in the Karakoram. The drive to train, to push through pain and terror and doubt, is one that burns deeply.

To anyone who’s sought to push their climbing beyond a modest bumbly state, it’s obvious psych is as important as strength or technique. We all know plenty of climbers who crank far harder

8

EDITOR’S LETTER

than more talented, stronger individuals purely because they are supremely motivated. Understanding this thing motivation, however, is hard and what motivates us can be opaque. It could be an aesthetic line, the potential attentions of a beautiful girl or boy, fame, fortune or fitness, the solitude of a remote area, the physical demands, the mental engagement, the flag-planting of being the first or just plain being the hardest. The pool of motivation is deep and broad.

This opacity allows us to easily lie to others about from where we draw our motivations – climbers do that all the time.

Sometimes it’s not even a lie we tell others but an expression of just how difficult it can be to describe the hunger to hang from rocks. But lying to yourself is an entirely different, more difficult matter, particularly when you are well out from your last piece of questionable gear, gripped, pumped and alone. That’s generally when we find out how powerful our psych truly is.

Even if you can recognise it and describe it, despairingly, psych is often ephemeral. Desperately hard to hold on to, it’s buffeted by the need to earn a dollar, blighted by injuries, undermined by temptations and squeezed by the demands of Life. Often this squeeze means we sate our hunger vicariously, devouring magazines and books, scouring the web and drooling over videos.

HED Which brings us this, our new venture, Vertical Life. It takes a fair whack of motivation to breathe life into a new mag, but we are psyched on the stories that bind us climbers together and on the ways we tell those stories. We are psyched on the possibilities an expanding digital world opens up for us, both as producers and audiences.

The media is changing and it is 1s and 0s that are bringing about these changes. We’re not sure what form the nascent and nebulous digital media is going to take in the bright, beautiful future, nor how we are going to develop from here, but we do know that we want in.

We want to explore the promises of new technologies. We want to connect with climbers through sound and vision and words and tell tall tales and true to entertain, engage and inform.

We are going to lift our eyes to our region and look towards the giant with the giant possibilities, China, to the rest of Asia and to our bros and sisters over the ditch in NZ. We think the climbing community deserves media that knows it, is a part of it, that cheers at it successes, yells at its stupidity and spanks it on the arse when it is bad.

We want to live a life in the vertical.

And above all we want you to get your psych on. ­— Simon Madden + Ross Taylor, Editors

THANKS Vertical Life would never have been born without the graceful and generous support of our contributors, featured climbers, athletes, advertisers, designers, dirtbags, videographers, advice-givers, hand-holders, web gurus, belayers and Adventure Types.

Thank you, our debt is great and our capacity to repay may fall short, but we love youse all.

CONTRIBUTING Vertical Life is a home to many voices, if you would like to be one of those voices, be it expressed in words, photography or video, send us an email at:

AU ozeditor@verticallifemag.com.au NZ nzeditor@verticallifemag.com.au 9

NZ FOLIO Image by James Morris

10

MATT EVERHARD ON THE CLASSIC CRIMP PROBLEM, MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL (V10), FLOCK HILL, CASTLE HILL, NEW ZEALAND. 11

12

BRONSON PANT The go to sending pant for Chris Sharma!

- Rugged - Abrasion-resistant - Micro-sanded canvas fabric built for roughing it!

- Gusseted crotch - Fixed waist and belt loops for holding it together under pressure.

- Slight stretch makes it perfect for climbing!

Distributed by Expedition Equipment Phone: 02 9417 5755 Email: sales@expeditionequipment.com.au www.expeditionequipment.com.au

Click on Chris to watch the Sharma legacy

13

IN THE FIRST COLUMN ON HER VERTICAL LIFE, ANDREA HAH TELLS US HOW IT ALL BEGAN. WORDS Andrea Hah IMAGES Nick Fletcher A common question climbers ask each other is, “how did you start climbing?” I am pretty confident that out on the field football players don’t ask each other how they got into their first game because it would often elicit the same response. Climbing is different. It used to be such an obscure pastime, and is still relatively unheard of in many circles, often misunderstood as merely a race to the top.

Climbing is so much more than that. Every person has a different story, and gets something different out of it from the next person.

I often read about climbers claiming climbing is their life. They live and breathe it and can’t imagine life without climbing. Is that what it takes to be a good climber? Am I like that? I have my doubts.

Maybe it’s my age? Maybe not. But I feel like every year since leaving university, there have been ‘big changes in the air’. Constantly at a crossroad, I constantly have ideas as to what I should do with my time.

14

Everyone goes through the life phase where you lay the foundations for where you want to be in the next year, through to the next 50 years. But I am constantly conflicted. Due to the ease of sharing life experiences on the internet, I seem to be constantly coaxed into joining the fun. Cool videos of bouldering in Font or the Rocklands.

Fun drunken pictures of friends at the Spring Racing Carnival.

Reports of some young punk kid onsighting 9a in Spain. Uni friends working at the AIS. Friends buying houses. Travelling to Portugal, Dubai.... you get the point. What do I do? Can I do it all?

I started gymnastics at the age of five. I was hooked. I did handstands in the lounge room. Forward rolls on the bed. Cartwheels in the playground. I trained 34 hours a week when I was 15. I went to school for four hours a day where I wasn’t allowed to play sports.

Instead, I went to the library to catch up on maths homework.

IMAGE August 1914 (29), Centennial Glen, Blue Mountains.

ANDREA HAH 1 5

WHEN I GO CLIMBING, IT’S MY THERAPY. IT BRINGS MY HAPPINESS LEVEL UP TWO NOTCHES, SOMETIMES MORE. I QUESTION WHY I DO IT ALL THE TIME AND THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS THE SAME. I LOVE IT.

IMAGE August 1914 (29), Centennial Glen, Blue Mountains.

1 6 ANDREA HAH

I ate salads and Vegemite for lunch. No butter. I was supervised for ‘weigh ins’ twice a day. Skin folds once a month. I went to a girls’ school. And blushed at the idea of a boy standing next to me on the train. I was good at gymnastics. But the beauty of hindsight tells me I was not the best I could be. I burnt out. I didn’t try as hard as I could.

I hurt my back and retired at the age of 16.

The Victorian Institute of Gymnastics has a great relationship with the VIS. Transfer of retired, burnt out, injured gymnasts to other sports is highly encouraged. I had a great coach who wanted to help me move on from all I knew. We thought about aerial skiing, Cirque du Soleil, hurdling, trampolining, diving, but none took my fancy.

Finally, Mark got it right. He suggested rockclimbing. Why did he think of such an obscure sport? I don’t know. He organised for me to go to the local indoor gym and on day one I spotted a cute guy climbing shirtless. And I’ve been hooked ever since. (I worry about the youth of today – that same gym now has a ‘no shirts off policy’.)

I joined the junior climbing squad, and trained six hours a week. Easy.

I had a coach Taruna, who treated me like a proper person. He didn’t yell at me if I fell. And he never made me cry. He is now one of my best friends, and I smile as I sit on his bouldering pad while writing this.

The transition from gymnastics to indoor climbing felt quite natural. I was fortunate enough to have the physical and mental foundations of gymnastics – the body awareness, flexibility and

good power-to-weight ratio. I had the background of performing under pressure – learning how to trust my body, and confidently control irrational fear, turning it into the execution of movement.

Getting the job done. The unnatural process only came once I started climbing outdoors. Camping and walking to the crag.

It’s amazing how many times I have rolled my ankles walking on uneven trails. And how much I cringed at the idea of wiping my spoon clean on my climbing pants. But, it seems I have adapted, and now I don’t even notice myself doing it at home.

For me, part of the beauty of climbing, is that it is self-driven. I don’t have anyone to report to if I don’t perform. If I don’t want to train or participate in competitions, I don’t have to. If I want to eat chocolate, I can. If there’s a party, I can drink alcohol and party all night long.

So, when I do train, it’s because I want to. When I go climbing, it’s my therapy. It brings my happiness level up two notches, sometimes more. I question why I do it all the time and the answer is always the same. I love it. And that I can say this with more certainty than I can about any of the other decisions I make every day ingrains in me the knowledge I am doing the right thing. Each and every time I tie in to my rope • Andrea’s vertical life is sponsored by Black Diamond, Cousin Trestec, Big John Climbing Equipment and Tenaya

17

SUCCESS, FAILURE AND SHITTING THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE IN PAKISTAN’S KARAKORUM. SIMON YOUNG ON LIFE LESSONS AND ATTEMPTING TO SAIL THROUGH STORMS IN THE SHIP OF FOOLS ON SHIPTON SPIRE. AUTHOR Simon Young IMAGES: Simon Young and Matt Scholes That phone conversation on a balmy summer’s night in the safety of my backyard seems a lifetime ago. As I watch Matt descend our wet, core-shot ropes I yearn to be sitting on that warm, soft grass. Instead, I beat my hands together, desperate to get some sensation back into them. Snow blows about us, my mind jerks violently out of the daydream. Clipping into our only two ropes, I start down the 18 pitches we had fought up over the previous three days. My heart aches at the realisation that, despite our best efforts, no summits would be reached.

I stepped onto Islamabad’s tarmac after a tiring day in transit, greeted by a blast of hot air and an AK-47. Trying to look as inconspicuous as a white tourist can, I waited patiently in line with my passport at the ready. A small patch of ink marked my entry into a country the Australian government recommends leaving.

A few weeks prior, a small volcano erupted in South America.

Like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, the spewed-out ash cloud had global implications, grounding all planes and making me miss my connection. I had to buy a new ticket. My schedule was shot.

When I did finally make it to the hotel lobby and allowed myself to relax, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. I had finally caught up to Matt, Jamie and Duncan, who were clearly frustrated at having to wait an extra few days in Islamabad. After quickly eating the first of many, many curries my head slammed onto the hard pillow and sleep overtook me.

19

The next day we forced breakfast down, piled into our newly acquired van and inched our way through the outskirts of the city. Slowly the road rose higher into the hills and I stared at the cannabis growing freely on both sides.

Everyone who knows a bit about Pakistan has heard about the Karakoram Highway. This amazing engineering feat, running beside the imposing Indus River, has a justified reputation for inducing life-affirming moments. Every corner shows exactly how far you would plummet to the river below if the driver lost control, knowledge that is not helped by our driver hurling into every blind corner.

After two long, frightening days of driving, the steep sides of the gorge eased off, giving way to the silt plains on the outskirts of Skardu. Large, snow-capped peaks started to take over the skyline.

We tucked into a memorable curry for dinner with the gusto of the newly arrived and not yet sick of curries, gladly sharing dinner with our new guide and friend, Aishaq (pronounced ee-sok). The locals were happy to see us passing through when they found out we were climbers, even more so when they realised we weren’t Americans.

The next day we sat through our briefing at the tourism office.

It wasn’t very brief, and the officials barely said a word.

Instead, piles of paperwork required signatures from Jamie, our expedition leader. After besting the almost-insurmountable

bureaucracy, we squeezed all our gear into the jeep that would take us to our trailhead, deep in the mountains.

Askole is the end of the road. It’s the gateway to the Baltoro Glacier, home to some of the world’s hardest 8000m giants.

Arriving, we scoffed a dinner of, yes, curry and crashed headlong into our beds, minds swimming with what was to come.

While I never saw an espresso machine in northern Pakistan, I’m convinced the porters must drink a lot of coffee. From the word go they were desperate to get a share of the work and with more porters than loads, it was up to our sirdar to organise the chaos as we made final preparations. Knowing the midday sun would beat down hard, we started walking early.

In camp that night, porter after porter visited the newly appointed ‘Dr’ Jamie, asking for various drugs or dressings. Having watched the porters toil all day without complaint was truly humbling.

They carried heavy loads on crude, homemade frames, often in little more than sandals, enduring silently while tourists struggled under the burden of a water bottle clipped to their belts.

The second day of the walk saw most of us shitting through the eye of a needle. My stomach was turning at the sight of food and nausea stopped me eating anything. When the going gets tough, the weak turn up their iPod and trudge on.

21

The next day my stomach had settled a bit and I ripped off the top of the Nutella jar and grabbed the nearest chapatti. My frail body needed any kind of breakfast; I could already feel kilos dropping away. Forget Jenny Craig and the Atkins diet. Stomach bugs, a little altitude, and all-day walking with a splash too much sun equals the most effective rapid weight loss formula.

We weaved up the glacier, vast walls of granite rocketing into the thin air beside us. Great Trango’s mighty profile saw us struck motionless with jaws agape. Nameless Tower came into view next as we slowly picked our way up the valley, eyes moving from one imposing peak to the next even more impressive one.

Blasting up the last moraine wall we were greeted by the lush, grassy meadow that would be our home for the next four weeks.

I looked out across the landscape and caught my first look at a huge granite wall only a few kilometres away. It rose some 1300m out of the glacier. With my breath literally taken away by the altitude, I mouthed two words: “SHIPTON SPIRE...”

As we settled into our new home I still felt sick, weak, and unable to eat much. Using our satphone we got a forecast for good weather.

I put my faith in a concoction of pills from my expedition bag and was stoked to soon be going camping on a big cliff.

“Anybody who says they got in a good night’s sleep before a big-wall climb is either lying or insane.” – Old climber’s saying.

Naked ambition drove us out of our sleeping bags early. We drank our first brew long before sunrise and crossed the intimidating glacier for the first time. We picked our way gingerly through a maze of debris and ice, often hitting dead ends that forced retreat.

Soon the sun revealed our first close-up glimpse of the face. It was much more featured than our tiny topo photo suggested.

Right on cue we heard the whirr of falling rock, a sound that instantly terrifies. We ducked for cover as the missile exploded like a mortar onto the scree field, thankfully some distance away.

We delicately made our way through the last of the cut-up glacier.

All the while, loosened stones crashed about the base of the wall. Soon we found ourselves at the foot of the long scree gully leading to the base of our route. The scree was so pulverised it more closely resembled kitty litter.

Having not been an inch above basecamp, we slogged our guts out and felt fully how unacclimatised we were. Standing breathless at the base of our route, Ship of Fools (VI 5.11/22 A2 WI6 1300m), we racked up, packed freshly collected melt-water and tried to piece together where the line went from the small topo and an article describing the first ascent.

22

THEY GOT IN A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP BEFORE A BIG-WALL CLIMB IS EITHER LYING OR INSANE.” –Old climber’s saying

23

24

I headed up the first pitch, making a grand total of 10m before pulling on a cam to pass a wet section. The rope went tight as I reached a belay at a loose, scaly ledge. Matt battled his way up, jugging the lead rope with a heavy backpack. As we would soon find out, seconding with the pack was often more physical than leading. Hauling also proved a nightmare; the bag kept getting stuck on loose, flaky shards that stuck out everywhere.

As we were hauling the second pitch I heard a terrifying sound.

A cascade of ice crashed off the walls all around us and as the ruckus subsided we each yelled out to make sure the other was okay. Matt made his way to the belay, nerves frayed and a cricket-ball-sized dent in his helmet. There was also a gnarly core-shot in our haul line.

As the day drew to an end, Matt cheekily ran up the next pitch, fixing a rope to save time for the following day. The ledge required some intricate landscaping in search of something approximating flat ground and we settled in for the night without setting up the tent. The forecast was for a fine night, and it couldn’t be wrong, could it?

As we felt the first few drops of rain, the decision came back to bite us. Too late to stay dry, we ducked into the tent as the rain turned to snow.

Dawn woke us to the realisation of snow setting in. To be successful, our plan to climb the giant peak with so little gear needed the weather to be perfect. It wasn’t. We made the hard decision to get out of Dodge.

A few hours later some slightly soggy monkeys (us) made it back to basecamp. To our amazement Jamie and Duncan were still on their chosen line on the Cats Ear Spire. We pulled out the binoculars and watched them putting in a huge effort moving slowly over wet rock through the wind and rain.

They finally conceded to the elements a few days later and joined us in going insane in basecamp, passing time reading books, talking shit and smoking hash, which mostly kept dark thoughts at bay.

The hunger to be up high burnt deep and having sat about idly for too long, we were bursting with energy. Finally a weather window came.

Matt and I packed for Shipton Spire, Jamie and Duncan headed for the classic Nameless Tower crack Eternal Flame (Vll 5.13a/28).

Once again we racked up below the granite expanse. After reclimbing the first four pitches we came to a crossroads; a piton drew us out right, but the ground to the left looked easier.

Matt followed his nose left, barely making the belay with all 60m of rope out. I gingerly jugged past some massive loose flakes, the odd trundle thrown in for good measure.

Matt had found a bolted belay but the bolts differed from those we had previously passed and we figured we were now on another route.

We followed our noses upwards, hoping to find Fantasy Island, a prominent ledge. The odd piece of fixed gear let us know others had taken these vertical paths before us.

We continued blindly following a large crack system, without any kind of topo or guide and soon stumbled onto what could only have been the hoped for Fantasy Island. Cursing the lack of a portaledge, we again hacked into dirt and rock to fashion a bed for the night.

Meal times are definitely my favourite part of big-wall climbing.

Even a freeze-dried meal is something to savour in the midst of exhaustion. Lying back with our feet up, we stared as clouds danced through an amazing sunset, lighting up the magnificent

26

peaks and rock towers that rose up to ring the glacier. Small birds flitted on the wind, chirping goodnight. We settled contentedly into our two-man sleeping bag, having caught a glimpse of the beauty in adventure we had set out to capture.

Waking to our second day, Matt fished out the precious coffee, a gift from my friends at rad Hobart cafe Yellow Bernard. Half a litre each saw us charging and, besting the mandatory big-wall clusterfuck, we were soon ready to climb. A beautiful, golden granite splitter loomed above but it wasn’t long before I was pulling on gear, just wanting to get up this thing as fast as possible. A full 60m pitch had me at the belay.

Matt snuck a peek up the next pitch as I passed him the rack. An iced-up chimney with a fixed rope frozen into place. Big-wall trash.

Pulling on whatever was available, he made his way up. Soon I was jugging the pitch behind him, slip-sliding on the ice. Another few pitches and we could nearly see the day’s goal – the Notch.

Jamming a splitter crack, Matt made his way onto a blank-looking face. Finding multiple dead ends he was forced to make some wild pendulums leftwards to link up with another crack. Digging his way up the overgrown crack, he fought to find a belay. To free up enough rope I had to untie, clamp an ascender to the very end and extend it with some slings while top-stepping the highest piece of the belay. With the night looming we turned tail and headed back down to our gear on the ledge below. We had hoped to reach the Notch that day, but ended still four pitches shy.

The next morning glorious weather welcomed us and suitably caffeinated we quickly regained our high point, where Matt set off into uncharted waters. (We would find out on the way down we had actually missed the turn-off for our intended route, and probably climbed some new pitches – explaining all the loose rock!)

We now had only a couple of low-angled pitches to the Notch and Matt sprinted up, this time leading with the second’s pack.

The terrain meant we couldn’t haul, so I climbed with the haul bag on my bag. Sucking hard for air I fought up the grade-12 slab in mountain boots, working harder than I ever had before and only just staying on. Getting to the Notch was my reward.

We stared up at the ridge riding the skyline above; it was a route of a completely different character, it was an alpine thing.

We stopped to catch our breath, put on a brew and chopped a camping ledge into solid ice. Feeling free and light at not having to bring all the big-wall baggage, I struck out in the late afternoon and found easy crack systems. Floating up them, I suddenly hit my stride. Looking about at the abundant beauty I found a peaceful happiness. This feeling is exactly why we go on these journeys, to escape the mundane. My sense of mastery of the moment was overwhelmingly cool. I hammered home a belay and made my way back to our temporary home, happy as can be.

27

Happiness makes optimists of us all. I looked around at the cirrus clouds, and still more forming, thinking, “It’ll be fine, it’s just a few clouds about the valley”. We packed our bags for the next day’s summit push. In 24 hours, we’d hopefully return to this ledge having been to the top.

However, the best laid schemes o’ mice and monkeys…

We were woken by wind and rain. Well, not really woken as the cold, cramped ledge wasn’t conducive to anything other than fitful slumber. Listening to the weather we knew we should have seen it coming. Optimism is no substitute for reason. We had shivered through the night, praying to any god that would listen for it to clear by morning.

Our splatter gun of prayers went unanswered and in the damp morning we looked through our meagre rations – one day’s food left – and considered options. After a few hours tiptoeing around the obvious, we decided to head down. Experience had shown the system would stay around for days, at least, leaving the ridge in a dangerous condition.

Matt retrieved our fixed line and we started retreating down the 18 pitches that had led us to the Notch. Cold, wet and tired, we paid extra care to our ropes, one having a nick at halfway, and the other a big core-shot. Slowly we made our way back down.

Walking across the glacier through the rain we cast our minds over the last few days. With a small amount of gear we had made good ground on a Karakorum big wall. We were both content, knowing we wouldn’t have done anything differently.

Still, the next few weeks saw us moping about basecamp. A short window allowed one mad dash up a massive snow gully towards Trango II. We climbed all night under a full moon, without headtorches or ropes. We moved quickly upwards, all of us in a quiet, reflective mood. Again, we did what it seems I do best: nearly made the summit before turning back a stone’s throw from the top. Still, it was an amazing 24 hours, climbing 2000m to look across the biggest mountain range in the world.

And soon we were walking out. A few days playing tourist and we were on a plane home. Most would call the trip a failure, in that we didn’t stand atop any piles of dirt. My time in the mountains though has allowed a great perspective on the things that truly matter. Memories may fade but new found perspectives remain; like the outlook of a rich westerner with too many “things”, confronted by raw poverty that rams home the only things that really matter in this life: relationships and experiences • “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

– Tyler Durden, Fight Club

29

REACTIVE LIGHTING

CONSTANT LIGHTING

DECLINING LIGHTING

ECLAIRAGE AUTOADAPTABLE

ECLAIRAGE CONSTANT

ECLAIRAGE DÉCROISSANT

Facebook. com/Petzl

TECHNICAL GEAR AND LIGHTING FOR ALL YOUR OUTDOOR ADVEN www.petzl.com.au www.spelean.com.au for stockists 30

REACTIVE LIGHTING

CONSTANT LIGHTING

DECLINING LIGHTING

ECLAIRAGE AUTOADAPTABLE

ECLAIRAGE CONSTANT

ECLAIRAGE DÉCROISSANT

NTURES ELIOS

REVERSO 4

HIRUNDOS

GRI GRI

31 The second to last pitch of the Spigolo Wiessner on the Sass d’Ortiga. Dolomites, Italia. ©Jocelyn Chavy

32

FOLIO Images by Simon Carter

SIMON CARTER needs no introduction, he is simply Australia’s best climbing photographer. Here is a selection of some of his finest recent images along with a description of the process of taking them, as well a short video where he talks about the art of climbing photography.

Crystal Davis on the vertiginous line of El Matador (5.10d/21), Devils Tower, Wyoming, USA.. Nikon D3s with 14-24mm f2.8 lens @ 14mm, aperture priority, 1/400 sec @ f9, ISO 400.

The first time I photographed this route was back in 2003 for The North Face. I was happy with that shot – and considering we snuck it in, in a ten minute blast of light squeezed in between a hailstorm and sunset, I was actually pretty stoked. But the Devils

Tower’s geometry is so striking it left me wondering – could there be a better way to show it? The answer was obvious – get the camera further out from the cliff. But how? I had the image that I wanted in my mind for years, and I mulled over the problem from time to time.

In 2006 I returned to Devils Tower but there was no chance to shoot due to big snowstorms. Still, just staring at the Tower again got me psyched to try to figure out the problem. So I bought some bits and pieces from a camera shop in Boulder and got a painter’s pole, and later on that trip (at Red River Gorge) played with ways to rig it all – and to get the camera to hang down below the pole (so it wasn’t just shooting straight down). I got some results then too – though I had to guess what the camera was seeing as I was shooting on film back then. It was four years before I was able to return to Devils Tower but by then I had refined the system and was shooting digital – and had a video feed running from the camera to a little monitor so that I could see the composition. For this shot I was able to get the camera about eight metres out from the cliff. I was really stoked this time!

Matt Norgrove on Mr Line (32), Diamond Falls, Blue Mountains, Australia.

Nikon D3s with 70-200mm f2.8 lens @ 130mm, manual mode, 1/400 sec @ f3.2, ISO 500.

34

I wanted a clean action shot from this shoot, so we waited for a cloudy afternoon to eliminate horrible harsh shadows. Then I abseiled in a fair way to the left so I could use a longish lens with a wide aperture to throw the background out of focus and isolate Matt.

After tensioning myself off a bolt to stop myself swinging around in space, it was just a matter of nailing the focus and blasting away at full 9fps when Matt was going for it.

Garry Phillips on pitch two of his mega new route Live the Life (pitches are 21,28,27,27,26 and 25) at Lake Huntley, Tyndall Range in western Tasmania, Australia.

Nikon D3s with 14-24mm f2.8 lens @ 14mm, manual mode, 1/500 sec @ f8, ISO 200.

FOLIO Images by Simon Carter 3 5

RIGHT Monique Forestier leading pitch nine of the Punta Delle Cinque Dita Traverse (Five Finger Towers), UIAA grade IV, 205m to the “Thumb” (the entire traverse is 600m), in the Sassolungo group, Dolomites, Italy. Nikon D3 with 85mm f 1.4 lens, manual mode, 1/6400 sec @ f4.5, ISO 200.

The aim was to shoot some of the moderate classic alpine rock routes inthe Dolomites for a new book and a Rock and Ice assignment. We met two super-competent American climbers, Rico Miledi and Dave Russell, who kindly offered to show us around and help out. The ‘moderate classics’ can get crowded so we were first in line when the Sassolungo Gondola started up in the morning.

We raced to the start of the route and climbed in two parties of two.

A guide who had probably done it 100 times, and his client, were

ABOVE Brittany Griffith on Mr Clean (5.11a/22), one of the immaculate lines on Devils Tower, Wyoming, USA

36

chomping at our heels. We ran some pitches together – luckily Rico and Dave had done it before – so that helped speed things along. It wasn’t until I was following the ninth pitch that I saw the first good photo opp. Rico was my rope gun, he locked me off and I just sat back on the rope. My camera kit was trimmed to the minimum; lens selection was simple. Monique was leading this one, it was pretty runout and the rock wasn’t great, she was 14 weeks pregnant (this was her last lead for a while) and so I wasn’t going ask her to pose around.

So I just lined things up, worked the shadow into my composition as best I could, and made sure I tracked the focus as she climbed through. Getting off is involved but we were back in the Sella Pass Refugio before the inevitable afternoon storm. Man, that refugio’s three-course dinner was out of this world!”

WATCH SIMON CARTER INTERVIEW VIDEO Brett Williams

FOLIO Images by Simon Carter 3 7

A HISTORY OF CLIMBING IN AUSTRALIA

WHEN DID CLIMBING IN AUSTRALIA REALLY BEGIN? MICHAEL MEADOWS FILTERS THROUGH THE HISTORIC RECORD TO EXAMINES THE OPTIONS. WORDS Michael Meadows IMAGES Bert Salmon Collection / Cliff and Lexie Wilson collection One fine March morning in 1910, a 23-year-old driver for the Royal Australian Artillery, Henry Mikalsen, scrambled onto the virgin summit of the 380m volcanic spire, Coonowrin or Crookneck, in the Glass House Mountains north of Brisbane and made Australian climbing history. It took him three hours to climb through the maze of shrubbery, loose boulders and cliffs that make up the vertical and sometimes overhanging north face of the mountain. Mikalsen lived with his family on a farm in the shadow of the towering and imposing trachyte peak. He climbed it alone and with no rope to assist him.

While in climbing terms it was a significant accomplishment, it took four months for his achievement to be reported in the local newspaper, the Brisbane Courier. Regardless, this single event was a catalyst that, a little more than a decade later, influenced the formation of the first organised rockclimbing activity in Australia.

3 8 THE HISTORY COLUMN

Three decades before Mikalsen’s achievement, Scottish-born explorer William Landsborough acknowledged that rockclimbing as a sport in Australia was lagging well behind its British antecedent. He observed shortly before his death in 1886 that if Crookneck was in England, “it would have been climbed a dozen times”. It was an accurate assessment as in the 1880s rockclimbing had been simultaneously born both in England’s Lake District and the German alps. Nevertheless, the ‘spiritual father’ of the Queensland-based rockclimbing movement – the enigmatic Albert “Bert” Armitage Salmon – persistently acknowledged Mikalsen’s feat as the birth of modern Australian climbing, with good reason: Crookneck was the last significant unclimbed summit in the region because it was quite simply the most difficult and dangerous.

Queenslander George Fraser traverses into the Boar’s Jaws, Narrowneck 1934 Bert Salmon Collection 39

There is another name that needs to be included here alongside Mikalsen’s, that of Australia’s first mountaineer: Emmaline Freda du Faur. Nine months after Mikalsen’s ascent of Crookneck, she became the first Australian – and the first woman – to climb Aoraki–Mt Cook in the New Zealand Alps. Freda du Faur, as she was known, excelled as a rockclimber, honing her skills on the rambling sandstone outcrops near her home in what is now Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai National Park. She was 28 when she stood on the highest summit in New Zealand with the two New Zealand brothers who had become her regular climbing partners, Peter and Alex Graham.

For Europeans, the idea of climbing is a significant but relatively recent element in a history of a fascination with mountains, as Robert MacFarlane so eloquently describes it in his excellent book, Mountains of the Mind. Similarly all features of the Australian landscape, including high places, were inscribed into Indigenous cosmology for millennia before European invasion but, sadly, much of this knowledge has been lost. It does though seem highly likely Indigenous people had climbed many, perhaps all, of the soughtafter summits across the country, generations before Europeans began to contemplate the activity we now know as climbing.

There are varied accounts of traditional Indigenous peoples, both here in Australia and around the world, climbing mountains – most commonly because high places were accorded powerful religious or spiritual significance. And because mountains were part of Indigenous cosmology, reasons for climbing them had to be justified in these terms. In effect, it was and remains for many, a parallel universe where the meaning of what we see now as everyday events – climbing, for example – is interpreted very differently. It is why the Anangu, for example, request people not to climb Uluru in central Australia and why other Indigenous clan groups make similar pleas for respect of local traditions at significant places in other parts of Australia.

As the invaders, we imposed our own perceptions of place on the landscape and in most cases, this overrode pre-existing traditional frameworks. Whatever we think about this, the simple fact is we cannot go back to the way it was; but it does not mean we should ignore the impact of our presence on the landscape in both physical and spiritual terms. The physical denigration of places by climbers has become an environmental issue in most states, with increasing scrutiny of bolt placement, for example, in national parks. Knowledge of this kind of activity does little to appease local Indigenous groups with custodianship of places that climbers frequent. These tensions are real and we must acknowledge them. Perhaps it boils down to a simple question of respect and an acknowledgement that White Europeans did not take the first steps on this continent.

But it remains a task for others more qualified than I to write a history of Indigenous perceptions of place. My focus is elsewhere.

4 0 THE HISTORY COLUMN

TOP Henry Mikalsen following his first ascent of Crookneck in 1910 / Published in Thomas Welsby, Discoverers of Moreton Bay, Brisbane, 1913 BOTTOM Brisbane Courier, 1910

“THE PHYSICAL DENIGRATION OF PLACES BY CLIMBERS HAS BECOME AN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE IN MOST STATES, WITH INCREASING SCRUTINY OF BOLT PLACEMENT, FOR EXAMPLE, IN NATIONAL PARKS. KNOWLEDGE OF THIS KIND OF ACTIVITY DOES LITTLE TO APPEASE LOCAL INDIGENOUS GROUPS WITH CUSTODIANSHIP OF PLACES THAT CLIMBERS FREQUENT. THESE TENSIONS ARE REAL AND WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE THEM.” There had been other European climbing activity in Australia well before the historic ascents by Mikalsen and du Faur in 1910, but it was sporadic and largely confined to isolated instances of individual activity, usually associated with a motive other than climbing for the sake of it. Exploration and scientific endeavour essentially dominated the desire to reach the colonial summits: William Hovell and Hamilton Hume reached the Mount Buffalo plateau in 1824 with the Mansfield brothers venturing into the Victorian Alps 25 years later. Rockclimbing was far from the intentions of these early explorers. In 1828 the brutal commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Patrick Logan, made his mark by recording the first European ascent of Mount Barney, one of the most spectacular mountains on the Australian mainland. He climbed the 1351m East Peak up the ridge that now bears his name, casting off his boots and socks to make the final steep and exposed 200m scramble to the summit alone, leaving his companions – botanists Allan Cunningham and Charles Fraser – languishing on the ridge below. It was the highest known mountain in Australia at the time and yet Logan’s achievement was reduced to a footnote – in which he was unnamed – in Cunningham’s report on the expedition to the Royal Society in London four years later. It remained the colony’s highest peak until 1834 when most probably scientist Dr J Lhotsky strolled to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko in the Australian Alps. The imposing 1177m rhyolite mass of Mount Lindesay on the Queensland–New South Wales border became another lodestone for would-be climbers with the first European ascent in the mid- to late-1940s. This was preceded by local stories of Aboriginal people climbing the towering cliffs using the vines that hung from the rainforest-clad verandas above.

The vines were reputedly destroyed by a huge bushfire in the late 1940s, but more on that in a future column.

LEFT Bert Salmon soloing the steep and loose North Face of Crookneck in the Glass House Mountains.

Bert Salmon Collection

41

The first Australian climbing movements – informal groups of friends who set out to make what were the hardest ascents of the day for the sake of climbing alone – emerged a few years apart, first in southeast Queensland in 1923 and subsequently a few years later in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Evidence suggests the Queensland-based cohort, centred around Bert Salmon, attracted not only young men but, significantly, women.

In fact, on some occasions, female climbers outnumbered their male counterparts. Interestingly, it is only now that the proportion of females engaged in rockclimbing is approaching that mark again. The emergence of influential female role models like American Coral Bowman and the home-grown Louise Shepherd have encouraged more Australian women to see climbing as not merely the preserve of ageing men wearing ‘baggy pants and hobbers’, as the enigmatic, eloquent and influential John Ewbank once described the ‘old guard’ of the Sydney Rockclimbing Club.

The popularity of rockclimbing in Australia spread slowly after World War II and more often than not, climbers emerged from the ranks of bushwalking clubs. It was not until the mid- to late-1960s that influences from the UK and California’s Yosemite would change rockclimbing here forever.

While the aim of my contributions through this regular column will be to focus on a history of the European – and particularly Australian – ‘invention’ of rockclimbing as a sport, pastime, recreation, vocation, however it is conceived, I think it is

important to consider our achievements in context. There is a rich tradition behind the façade of modern day climbing and I plan to delve into this in future writings. I should say from the outset that some of you will undoubtedly take issue with inadvertent (or ill-informed) errors I will make and I welcome any feedback that will help to put the record straight – after all history is not an exact science by any measure. The extensive information relating to Australian climbing history I and others have gathered over the past decade-and-a-half has come primarily from archival collections (private photographs, diaries, manuscripts and newspaper cuttings), existing published works and interviews. Some of this material has been given a brief airing on my blog, The Living Rock, ( http://climbinghistoryoz. blogspot.com.au) which is a precursor to a book I hope to soon publish on this topic. This column will offer an opportunity to delve into some of the earliest known accounts of climbing in Australia. The protagonists may not have had a shiny new rack of cams and chocks but they paved the way for the tens of thousands of us around Australia who call ourselves climbers.

I am delighted to be involved in this exciting new publication and look forward to sharing some of the wonderful stories of influential people and events with you in upcoming issues.

I congratulate all involved in the venture as it can only serve to make us more aware of our own rich, rockclimbing heritage •

m.meadows@griffith.edu.au

Climbing for the camera…A typical group of Queensland climbers in action for Cinesound News on Tibrogargan in the Glass House Mountains near Brisbane in 1934 4 2 THE HISTORY COLUMN

Cliff and Lexie Wilson collection

BLACK DIAMOND ATHLETE BEN COSSEY

ANDREA HAH

MR LINE 32

BLUE MOUNTAINS NSW

proudly supported by

43

TITAN

FREE

4 4 IMAGE The shadow silhouette of Mount Geryon.

TWO BROTHERS RETRACE THEIR FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS 44 YEARS AFTER HIS FIRST ASCENT OF TITAN ON GERYON’S EAST FACE AUTHOR Ross Taylor IMAGES Historic images Rob Taylor All other images by the Author

It is 1968, the dying days of a Tasmanian summer.

My father, Rob Taylor, and his climbing partner, Roland Pauligk, maker of the legendary brass wires RPs, stand beneath the vast dolerite spine of Mt Geryon in the dominion of Gods, Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain – Lake St Clair National Park. Rising more than 300m above them is the powerful crack and corner system they intend to climb.

By today’s standards their climbing gear is antiquated: wooden chocks tied off with cord, mild steel pitons,

hexes cut from steel bar, a hand-drill, hammer and bolts and a selection of Roland’s heavy handmade stainless steel pitons. They are clad in the rough gear of the era: woollen jumpers, flannelette shirts, hard-soled EBs and heavy climbing helmets – they wear no harnesses, instead they tie the end of the rope around their waists.

But the spirit of adventure is strong in them, and they leave the ground at 9am, heading boldly into the unknown.

45

Moss falls in my eyes. I rip out a small leafy plant getting in the way of a good jam, and stuff my taped-up hands deep into the recesses of the crack. It bites in the good way you want when you are desperate, but at the same time you know will hurt later.

Above me the crack stretches towards a wide off-width roof liberally covered with black moss; chockstones wedged in the back like rotten, uneven teeth in a savage vertical smirk. Giant cams pull at my waist, the daypack on my back filled with water adding its own awkward weight.

How did I end up here? Good question.

Sometimes history has its own weight, tugging at your sleeve incessantly until you can no longer ignore it. Forty-four years ago my dad and Roland climbed a new route on Geryon called Titan, a proud, intimidating line on the vast, 300m-high East Face which goes to the top of the Foresight, a pillar of rock that sits between the North and South summits of Geryon. But they left a little unfinished business. In the style of the day, where just getting to the top was the main thing, they used aid on six of the 13 pitches, grading it 17A3 – a grade that suggested it would require some hard climbing to free it.

I had always carried a vague plan to try and free Titan, one day.

But life is often unforgiving of vague plans. Plus the description in Chris Baxter’s mini-guide to Geryon didn’t make it sound exactly alluring: “This (probably) unrepeated scrubby monster was a big effort for the day, but could well go free to an off-width king.”

I am mainly a soft sportclimber that steers well clear of cracks, particularly the scrubby kind, and I am definitely no off-width king, unless the title is given to the monarch of avoiding them.

But really it started with a phone call from my brother Lachy.

“Hey mate, you coming down to Tassie at all this summer?”

46

TOP LEFT Lachy on the summit of Foresight.

MIDDLE LEFT Roland on the historic sixth pitch,44 years earlier.

BOTTOM The second abseil off the gully below the Foresight.

(Lachy lives in Hobart.)

I’m keen to, what do you have in mind?”

“What about freeing Titan?”

Like many decisions where you don’t know exactly what is involved, it was easy to make.

“Sure.”

And so it began. But the story was a little more complex than that.

As it turned out, we had a little competition to free Titan – that nasty description hadn’t put everyone off.

Tasmania is full of strange, twisted characters who are into all kinds of perverse pleasures, including off-widths, and one man with more than an unnatural taste for them is ‘Crazy John’ Fischer, or CJ, as everyone calls him. CJ had been into Geryon to try Titan not once, but twice. During the first trip with Deano Rollins the two of them spent five days at the Geryon Campsite (which is in the damp, sunless valley below the West Face) waiting for the rain to stop (it didn’t), living on a diet of Mi Goreng noodles and playing endless hands of spades. On the second trip CJ had good weather, but his partner, in CJ’s words, “Shat himself,” so they ended up doing nothing.

And so Titan remained un-freed.

But, CJ had plans to return – and he really is an off-width king, having repeated many of the hardest in Tassie (indeed, run laps on them). At the same time Lachy and I made our plans and hoped we could at least convince CJ to hold off and join us as the rope gun on our attempt. My brother was the conduit in this conversation between the three of us, and duly reported that CJ had made plans to go back into Geryon on the Australia Day weekend, this time with his girlfriend Anna. But, as if cursed, when Australia Day weekend came Anna pulled out, exhausted from work. And so CJ planned to come in with us in late February.

47

It was a fine and sunny day when the Lake St Clair ferry dropped my brother and I at Narcissus, from where we had a six or seven hour walk up to the bivvy cave at the foot of the East Face of Mt Geryon. Despite our heavy packs, full with food and climbing gear, we were feeling fit and strong, having just come off an eight-day walk to Precipitous Bluff on the South Coast of Tassie, where we had climbed a new route.

Sadly, we were not blessed with a rope gun. CJ had pulled the pin at the last moment because he was a lettuce-packing piker (he’d been offered a week’s work packing lettuces). We were going to have to tackle those off-widths on our own.

We walked the nine kilometres to Pine Valley Hut quickly. On the way my brother’s phone beeped a message – from CJ. He had packed in the lettuce packing and was coming to join us the afternoon of the following day.

As he said at the end of the message, “Fuck yeah!” It did leave us with a dilemma though, we only had two climbing days and if it was good the next day we didn’t want to waste it waiting for CJ. We decided if the weather was good, we would go for it, if not, CJ could join us the following day.

It took us another hour from Pine Valley Hut to the Geryon Campsite, where we filled up with ten litres of water because we were uncertain about the water situation at the bivvy. Although Roland had told us about a small spring nearby, it had been a dry summer. Our packs felt considerably heavier as we climbed the steep scree slope below the West Face of Geryon, then traversed across to the saddle between Geryon and the Acropolis, before traversing back below the East Face.

Under the East Face we stopped to find the line of Titan.

Although the face looked foreshortened from the ground – like it was 150m instead of 350m – the crack looked wide and intimidating.

We headed on to the bivvy, eager to check it out. Almost 44 years ago exactly, our father had come here with Roland and a bunch of others, including my mother, who had endured part of her honeymoon in this cave. Not only had my dad lost his wedding ring doing a new route on the West Face of Geryon, but mum and dad had gotten benighted on the South Peak of Geryon with another couple, the four of them sharing a very windy, sleepless night with only a space blanket to keep them warm.

How my dad managed to get my mum to spend her honeymoon this way (and how they are still married), I will never know.

The bivvy cave was smaller than we imagined, about a metre and half deep.

But some history still remained; Roland called the bivvy ‘Heim’, German for home, and had made a small wooden plaque with the name carved out on it – it still hung from the roof of the cave from two rusty old pitons. There were also some old abandoned tins in the back and a broken helmet.

We made ourselves comfortable in the two flattest spots available, then went to find water. It was just where Roland said it would be, a crystal-clear spring of freezing water. With its incredible view out to the cirque below the DuCane Range, Heim seemed like the most magical spot to spend time.

That night we set the alarm for a pre-dawn start – Titan was 350m long, we would need all the time we could get to make it up and then negotiate the long descent off.

48

I HAD ALWAYS CARRIED A VAGUE PLAN TO TRY AND FREE TITAN, ONE DAY. BUT LIFE IS OFTEN UNFORGIVING OF VAGUE PLANS.

49

RIGHT Lachy seconding the tricky and exposed 12th pitch.

“Beep, beep, beep...” The alarm dragged me from deep sleep.

It was dark and cold and there was thick cloud scudding through the Acropolis–Geryon saddle at high speed. I didn’t stir from the warmth of my sleeping bag, and when Lachy asked if we should get up, I said, “Give it another half an hour...”

It wasn’t looking any better half an hour later either when we dragged ourselves out of our bags and into the cold morning air.

Still, we made porridge, ate, then geared up and headed over to the base of Titan. Looking up, half the wall was hidden in cloud.

I started up the first pitch, a chimney jammed with giant chockstones. It was good to be on rock, the rough dolerite grippy beneath my fingers. I belayed at the base of a scree slope, off a tipped-out cam, a wire between two loose blocks and the tied-off root of a bush. Lachy led on through, if you can call scrambling up a loose scree slope climbing, belaying at the base of where the proper climbing started. As I seconded light rain began to fall. At the belay we couldn’t see more than 15m above us for mist. We decided to wait. Half an hour later the rain was getting heavier and we retreated back to Heim. Everything would ride on the weather being good the next day.

50

Back at Heim it got cold and we rugged up, reading and dozing in our sleeping bags. We kept expecting to hear or see CJ, but as the day stretched into the afternoon there was no sign of him. Then, just as we thought he must have piked, we heard his voice calling through the cloud. Eventually, two or three hours later, he and a mate, Simon Bischoff, appeared looking very wet and bedraggled – apparently CJ had told Simon they wouldn’t need rain jackets... They had also come up the Acropolis track instead of via the Geryon Campsite, but when they got to the top of the Acropolis and tried to scramble down to the saddle they were greeted by a wall of cloud and a precipitous drop. There they had had to wait until the cloud cleared, allowing them to find a way down.

Despite the epic, CJ was his usual ebullient self. While Simon seemed a little worn down, particularly after he changed into his dry clothes, then got lost and soaked again looking for the little water spring.

We had expected CJ to turn up on his own, so now we had some delicate negotiations because there was no way you wanted two parties on a route with so much loose rock. However, CJ had already realised this, and had decided to try the Shield (24), a Steve Monks’ route, and the hardest line on the wall. Now we all just needed decent weather.

That night the clouds cleared to reveal the most incredible array of stars.

51

WE WOKE UP AT DAWN TO THE MOST AMAZING SUNRISE – AND CLEAR SKIES, THE DAY WAS LOOKING GOOD.

52

RIGHT Lachy holding one of Roland’s homemade stainless steel pegs.

We woke up at dawn to the most amazing sunrise – and clear skies, the day was looking good. Lachy and I were climbing by 8am, the first two pitches racing by. At our highpoint we argued about which crack line to take for the third pitch – there were many cracks and the description was vague.

My lead probably didn’t follow the original line, but we ended up on what was the right belay ledge, where Lachy lead the next pitch; across and left and up to the base of the main crack of Titan, which loomed unmistakably above.

The next pitch was mine and the first of the aid pitches, graded 17A2.

According to my dad’s diary, on the first day of climbing Titan – it took them three days all up – they had climbed up to this first hard pitch, which Roland then took several hours to lead, before dad followed, cleaning what he could. Then they had abseiled back to the ground and spent another night at Heim.

The start of the pitch was quite tricky, made harder by small bushes and thick, black moss crusting the inside of the crack and falling in my eyes. I was glad I wore tape gloves. But aside from that, the climbing was good, maybe grade 18 or 19 jamming, with the occasional face hold, and protected by biggish cams. It was with excitement that I found the first sign of dad and Roland’s passing: an ancient wooden wedge, still with cord tied through the eye. I didn’t clip it.

It was exciting to get to the belay with the first aid pitch done clean – where I belayed off a single old carrot that Roland would have placed.

Funnily enough, we only had one bolt bracket that I had mistakenly not given back to a mate when we were climbing at Freycinet a few days earlier – it was an RP bracket.

I brought Lachy up for his lead. He took one look at the dirty, overhanging off-width above, jammed with chockstones and lined with black moss, and decided it wasn’t for him. I was happy to take the lead.

Dad’s diary says this about their next day on Titan: “Return to previous high point. Roland prussiks fixed rope and I climb. Surmount the overhang and then difficult rock. Just as it is getting dark we get to reasonable stance – however, Roland insists on going on to a ‘better’ one – in the pitch dark. Follow with pack, pulling up on bushes. New bivvy is sitting only.”

The next pitch was 13A3. At its very start Roland and dad aided up the wall to the left of the crack using a bolt, but I climbed straight up the crack, protecting it with a big Camalot that they wouldn’t have had.

The overhang looked hard, but despite the steepness and the moss, I climbed through fairly easily, clinging onto the chockstones jammed in its mouth. Another aid pitch down, maybe grade 18 or so.

I was carrying our water in a hydration bladder on my back and every time my brother wanted to drink he had to suck on the hose attached to my chest. So it wasn’t long before I was offering him a drink of ‘brother’smilk’ at every belay. For some reason it really put him off his water.

The seventh pitch followed a number of discontinuous corner cracks at 13A2. It was actually quite tricky to know which corner to take, and halfway up the pitch I was stopped by an unremarkable little corner. It had low gear, while the corner walls were coated with black moss, making it tricky to commit to the hard moves above. After climbing up and down several times and arguing with Lachy, I started trying a variant just to the right, only to fall off it.

After much tooing and froing I brought Lachy up, then tried the corner again, only to fall off it too and land on the ledge.

Impasse.

Annoyed, I climbed down and to the right, then up into another corner, which had a desperate move guarding its entrance. I kneebarred up a very wide crack then was blessed with easier ground.

I raced up the rest of the pitch linking it into pitch eight, running it out in eagerness to make up for lost time.

Dad and Roland spent their uncomfortable night somewhere up around this pitch, dad wrote, “Doze in fits and starts. Roland snores.

Sunrise over the Traveller Range. Climbing now easier. Penultimate pitch is hard and light running out. I take a fall – peg pulls.”

Pitch nine and 10 were both graded 13A2, but went okay. Pitch 11 was graded 15, but was probably harder and quite bold, making me glad we carried in the number five Camalot. Pitch 12 was the penultimate pitch dad foretold in his diary. When I spoke to Roland he remembered dad taking a big fall, telling me about how dad had been complaining about Roland hammering in the pegs too hard...just before he pulled one out and took a big fall.

The pitch followed a tricky corner system, that is maybe 18, then exited right around a roof that exposes you to 300m of clear air to the ground. At the end of the roof, on the arete, was what looked like a block so loose as to be merely sitting there. After some procrastination I realised there was no way I could climb around it – you had to fully commit to pulling on the block with your full weight (there were no footholds) and swing around the arete.

Having come so far there was no going back, and with my heart in my mouth I committed; the block held, and I cranked around onto a good stance.

All I had to do then was climb the thin crack above past a bolt and, with just one easy pitch to the summit, we would be home.. The thin crack wasn’t easy. I clipped the bolt with our one hanger, then did the old up-down thing, trying the moves and scuttling back to the rest. Time was slipping away. After much fiddling around I worked out I could step right onto a slab, which I climbed with no gear for six or seven metres, until I hit easy ground.

54

TOP Roland’s name plaque for Heim, put up in February 1967, according to the inscription on the back.

LEFT Lachy seconding the 5th pitch, which was the first one with aid to be freed.

RIGHT Lachy below the line of Titan.

I whooped as I brought Lachy up. He led on through to the summit of the Foresight, his screams echoing through the cirque, then he brought me on up. It was 6.30pm, we had been climbing for 10 and a half hours. The sun was low in the sky out to the west, the shadow of Geryon showing the ragged silhouette of the South Summit, the Foresight and the North Summit – Geryon was a mythical three-headed monster afterall. We could see out over the Traveller Range to the east, the Acropolis to the north and to the east, out over the Labyrinth and beyond to Frenchmans Cap. When Roland and dad breached the summit it was late in the day and they were forced to spend the night on its table-sized summit. Roland remembers my dad being reluctant to share his sleeping bag, but in my dad’s diary he wrote, “Spend night on summit in steady rain with unzipped sleeping bag – soaked.”

The next day they started descending at first light.

Lachy and I took photos and shot a short video for our dad, before starting the series of abseils to get off. Shortly after we ran out of brother’s milk, our mouths cottony with dehydration.

As we descended the West Face it was bathed in an orange glow.

It took us an hour to get back to the track and as we arrived at the Geryon–Acropolis saddle darkness descended and we made bush-bash back to Heim by headtorch. We arrived 9.30, badly dehydrated, totally wasted, but ridiculously happy.

Unlike CJ. He and Simon didn’t have a good day. The first eight pitches of the Shield are basically access pitches and, as they discovered, totally rubbish, covered in loose rock and bushes.

Three or four pitches up CJ managed to drop his girlfriend’s camera 80m (which he miraculously recovered unbroken), after which they decided to retreat, spending the rest of the day sulking around Heim. Simon had had such a bad time he wasn’t even keen to climb the next day. That night as I drifted off to sleep I am sure I heard CJ sobbing gently.

The next day Lachy and I were up at dawn again to leave; I had a plane to catch back to Melbourne that evening. We made our way out by the light of headtorch, the East Face looming above us in the dark; it was no longer such a mystery, we had unlocked one small path up its mighty face. As the sun slowly rose, bathing it in rich early morning light, we felt incredibly lucky that we had written our own chapter in the story of Titan, 44 years after Roland and dad had begun it.

As it turned out, CJ’s trip wasn’t totally in vain, he did come away with some climbing spoils. But that is a whole other story, which you can read about here >

cjclimbs.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/blog-post.html

TOP Roland leading during the first ascent of Titan.

BOTTOM An old wooden wedge left over from the first ascent.

57

WATCH SIMON WEILL DOING MANHANDLED (V11) LEFT Simon Weill climbing Hand Out (V6).

Sarah Osborne

TA K E Y O U R V E R T I C A L L I F E

HORIZ WE BRING YOU THE PHOTO TOPO FOR THE CAVE OF MAN HANDS, A RAD NEW BOULDERING CAVE IN THE VICTORIA RANGE, SOUTHERN GRAMPIANS.

Discovered last winter, the Cave of Man Hands offers some superb

IMAGES Simon Madden + Sarah Osborne VIDEO Brett Williams

Follow this until you hit the base of a rocky escarpment. Clamber over

new bouldering in a beautiful setting, with only a short walk in. Most problems were put up by Simon Weill, with a couple of additions by Dr Julian Saunders and VL’s own honcho Ross Taylor.

To get to the Cave park at Manja Shelter on the Harrop Track, which is just south of the turn off to Buandik Campground. Follow the walking track east, after about five minutes it will start to bend south, shortly afterwards there should be a very faint track that continues east. the escarpment and continue a further five minutes, until just below the main cliff. Now, look down and to the left, you should behold the well-hidden Cave of Man Hands (but it can be a little tricky).

5 8 THE TOPO

1. Julesy’s Problem (V9ish) 2. Hand Solo (V11) Start in the far left of the cave and work your way right before finishing up a combination of Manhandled and Cold Hands.

3. Underhanded Tactics (V8)* Head straight up the obvious flakes to a hard and high finish.

4. Manhandled (V11)** Hard climbing with a powerful and shouldery crux.

5. Cold Hands, Cold Heart (V9)** Fantastic moves using some really interesting holds. Tough Start.

6. Dos Manos (V11)* Easy climbing leads to a couple of hard moves on slopey holds.

7. The Sound of One Man Hand Clapping (V11)** Easy climbing to a dynamic and reachy section through a blank looking roof. Cut loose and prosper.

8. The Pummelling (V4)* Follows the obvious rib to a tricky finish.

Download a printer-friendly version of the full topo from the VL site

O N TA L AT T H E C A V E O F M A N H A N D S

2 1

3

4

7 5

RIGHT HAND SIDE TOPO

6

8

Mayan Smith-Gobat at home in Castle Hill, New Zealand.

Rich Crowder.

60

MAYAN SMITHGOBAT FOCUSED, DETERMINED, TALENTED: WE SPEAK TO NEW ZEALAND’S FINEST FEMALE CLIMBER. IMAGES Simon Carter, Rich Crowder and Danny Uhlmann

INTERVIEW MAYAN SMITH-GOBAT 6 1

How did you start climbing?

What was it about climbing that made you give up the skiing,

I was born in the shadow of Mt Cook, so I’ve been exposed to climbing all my life. However, we moved when I was five-years-old, and I didn’t start climbing until I was 15. I got a summer job at Mt Cook and took a mountaineering course, which started me alpine climbing. The following summer I returned but the weather was really bad, so I went rockclimbing instead – and loved it!

particularly when you were the best in NZ?

When I left school I moved back down to the South Island and climbed and skied for a bit, but soon the skiing took over. I spent the next couple years following winters around the world and skiing competitively until I had a bad accident, resulting in two broken feet and a broken jaw. I was unable to walk for about four months, so I returned to climbing because I could train my upper body and have been focusing solely on climbing ever since.

The catalyst was the accident. I’m unable to sit still for long periods of time, so I began training my upper body and climbing again (on one foot) to keep from going insane! In the process I rediscovered my love for climbing; I believe it fits my personality better. I love the problem solving aspect. I also find the climbing scene much less pretentious than the skiing scene, and I much rather living in a warm climate than being cold all the time! My decision was also helped by me very quickly becoming the best in NZ, and I knew I had a lot of room for improvement.

Looking back at it now, even while I was skiing, I always knew I would return to climbing at some point in my life – I always felt

While climbing and skiing are two very different sports, have you found any of the skills from skiing have translated across to climbing?

a strong attraction to the sport!

The mental game has distinct similarities. Controlling your head space in stressful situations, and maintaining a calm mind, especially in the face of danger, is key for both climbing and skiing. Although while climbing I rarely get myself into really lifethreatening situations, there’s a lot of perceived risk and not letting this affect you is crucial to performing well. This is something that has definitely translated across from extreme skiing to climbing.

Everything! The full mental and physical challenge, and total focus

What is it that you enjoy about climbing? required to climb at your limit. The parts of myself it’s exposed and the way it forces me to face my weaknesses – there is no hiding behind pretenses. The direct contact with nature – the raw power of the places it takes you. The lifestyle it promotes, and the amazing group of people around the world that have become my family through climbing.

LEFT Smith-Gobat looking fit on the crux Salathe headwall pitch (5.13b/29).

Danny Uhlmann.

RIGHT Attempting Colossus (33) at Little Babylon, Darran Mountains, New Zealand. Simon Carter.

You seem to be one of those climbers who has steadily improved, what do you see as the major turning points in your climbing career?

In 2009 you climbed L’Arcademecien 8c/33, the hardest route by an Australasian woman, do you have plans to push your sport climbing further?

There have been several, the first was the accident. Then traveling to Europe to compete in the World Cups, which introduced me to the European scene and opened my eyes to the endless possibilities Europe has to offer. The year before that trip I’d been studying, in a futile attempt to have a proper career, but climbing in Europe made me realise climbing was what I really wanted. Not competition climbing, but climbing inspiring lines on real rock and pushing myself to my limit. Most recently, my trip to Yosemite in 2009. When I discovered that I have some natural ability to move over those huge granite walls, and that I really love this type of challenge – the long sustained effort and suffering required to climb these huge routes.

Yes, definitely! I am actually en route to Europe at the moment intending to spend this (northern) spring in Spain sportclimbing.

What do you see as your greatest strength as a climber?

My perseverance, dedication and stubbornness.

Simply not giving up once my mind is set on something.

You were invited on the Petzl RocTrip in the Getu Valley in China where you got to climb with Lynn, what was that like?

It was a very special experience. We climbed the ultra classic, four-pitch route running straight through the roof, established

by Arnaud Petit and Stephanie Bodet – it’s a fantastic, wild route!

It was great to climb with, and be on the same level as, the one person I’ve always looked up to in climbing. I also really enjoyed getting to know Lynn a little on a personal level.

You’ve now climbed a couple of free routes on El Capitan, first Salathe (5.13b/29, 35 pitches) then Freerider (5.12d/27, 35 pitches) in a day, what inspired you to start trad climbing after climbing some very hard sport routes?

I’ve always wanted to be a well-rounded climber, and pure crack climbing was something I wasn’t familiar with at all. I’ve always wanted to go and spend some time in Yosemite learning these skills. I have also always been fascinated by big wall climbing – that many pitches in a row and living on the wall were things I wanted to experience... but I had no idea I would become so obsessed by it.

When you were working on Salathe you spent a lot of time up on the crux headwall by yourself trying it – how exposed is it up there, and what was it like?

It’s fantastic! The headwall of the Salathe is one of the most amazing places in the world, and definitely one of my favourite places to be. It is super exposed: a blank five-degree overhung wall, with one flaring crack running up the center, suspended above a 900m freefall to the valley floor!

It was intimidating at first, especially because it was the first time I’d used a Mini-traxion as a self-belay device and was trying to figure my systems out. But I quickly became very comfortable, and simply loved being there on my own.

Okay, Punks in the Gym (32). On your blog it says you’ve put more time into this route than any other, what is it about the route that keeps bringing you back, and why do you think you are finding it so hard?

Punks in the Gym is an inspiring route in many different ways: it’s an aesthetically beautiful line; it requires an incredible mixture of powerful yet technical climbing; and, of course, the history, the fact it was climbed by Wolfgang Gullich (the master of sportclimbing), it was the first 32 in the world, and has not yet had a female ascent!

In addition, because of the reachy nature of the route I always thought I would never be able to climb it. So when I discovered a way that worked for me, I became very determined. Once I have invested a certain amount of time and effort into a route, I simply cannot walk away.

You and Jarmila Tyrril have both put in a fair bit of time on Punks – whoever climbs it first will claim the first female ascent – is there an unspoken (or spoken) rivalry to do it first?

Well, I can only speak for myself. We’ve spent some time working the route together, and there was no obvious rivalry. We were both supportive and encouraging of one another. But I do know we’re both pretty competitive people, so I’m sure there is some underlying competition there. The bottom line is I want to climb Punks for myself, irrespective of who has climbed it previously.

The few times I have seen you climb, you seem very focused and not afraid to push yourself, have you always had a good head for climbing?

Yes, I’m very focused and love pushing myself hard, almost to a fault at times, when really focused I shut everything and everyone out.

I’ve always been good at controlling my emotions and switching off fear and other distractions. I’ve also always had a fascination with being up high, and don’t ever remember being scared of heights, but the level of comfort and control has definitely increased through continuously putting myself in exposed situations.

You’re involved with Pro Climbers International (PCI), can you tell us a little about this organisation, as many people won’t have heard about it, and why you became a member?

PCI is a not-for-profit organisation, which focuses on connecting athletes with the community and giving them job opportunities outside of sponsorships, through events such as clinics, slide shows and school programs. It promotes these top climbers as role models, instructors, athletes and all-around good people,

64

and in this way inspires others to become top level athletes.

I joined PCI because I like the idea of being part of an association of these top-level climbers. It’s not easy trying to be a professional climber, especially dealing with larger companies and trying to promote myself in a professional manner. I jumped at the opportunity to get some help with these aspects, and form contacts in the international scene.

The New Zealand climbing scene is even smaller than Australia’s, has that made it more difficult for you to become a professional climber?

I don’t think becoming a professional climber is an easy task anywhere in the world. But yes, it is definitely much harder in such a small scene... Actually it’s virtually impossible! The only way I’m managing to make it work is by travelling a lot, becoming recognised internationally and working on getting sponsorship from international companies rather than local NZ companies.

Sometimes coming from NZ works to my advantage, because it gives me a point of interest. However, it’s been hard work to make people acknowledge me as an international athlete.

Have you found that with more sponsorship comes more pressure to perform?

I try not to let it put more pressure on me because I want to keep my passion for climbing pure. Climbing is something I love doing for myself, and that’s the way I want to keep it. Having more sponsorship just makes me put more effort into publicising my achievements, updating my blog frequently and making sure I get photos and video footage.

You have done quite a few hard routes in New Zealand, is there still a lot of stuff you are psyched to do there?

Yes, but not that many and there are a lot of routes in the world I would rather do than those few in NZ. In saying that there are some amazing routes and projects in the Darrans I’d like to go back to at some point. But that is the only place in NZ I’m really keen on now.

Do you have other big wall routes that you want to do in Yosemite?

I’m definitely planning to be back in Yosemite this Autumn, but I’m not sure what I want to work on yet. The Nose is something I’d like to play on, to try to work out the Changing Corners pitch. But I’ve definitely found that nothing I have been on so far compares to the Salathe Headwall – it’s the most amazing pitch ever, so I have been thinking about trying to do the Salathe in a day as well.... Who knows, there are a lot of options!

Mayan is sponsored by Five Ten, Blue Water Ropes, Petzl, Earth Sea Sky and Em’s Power Cookies.

To find out more visit

www.mayanclimbs.com

RIGHT The stupendous crux headwall pitch of Salathe (5.13b/29) Danny Uhlmann.

CLIMBING IN EUROPE MADE ME REALISE CLIMBING WAS WHAT I REALLY WANTED. NOT COMPETITION CLIMBING, BUT CLIMBING INSPIRING LINES ON REAL ROCK AND PUSHING MYSELF TO THE LIMIT.

65

From China with Love

WORDS Matt Norgrove and Daniel Lee IMAGES Daniel Lee

66

Each year Petzl holds its acclaimed RocTrip, last year the destination was China.

Two Aussies made the trip to the remote corner of the republic, and survived to tell the tale...

DANIEL LEE I’m lined up at KFC anxiously trying to decipher the menu – there’s a throng of people behind me and I should be on the bus. My head is swimming, a brief skim of “phrases you might need” the night before did not include “two-piece feed”. As it turns out most of the phrases “you might need”, you don’t, and even if you did, you certainly couldn’t pronounce them well enough to be understood.

China travel tip number one, throw the phrase book away.

Other bits of advice swirl around my travel weary brain, “just eat local, it will be safer”, “I got sick from the street vendor”, “don’t eat the chicken you’ll get sick”, “eat the chicken at least it will be chicken”.

Why is KFC the only fast food in Guiyang Airport? And will that loudmouth American be quiet for just a moment? Imagine travelling with him...actually, he looks like Dave Graham…it IS Dave Graham.

Rewind. Spelean P/L, the Australian/New Zealand Petzl distributor, and my very patient employer, had offered to send a team on the journey of a lifetime, the Petzl RocTrip. I just had to convince them to send me. I may have done couple of laps of the planet and spent some time in Asia, but sadly I don’t climb hard and I’m the least senior Sales Rep. Fortunately, fate blessed my colleagues with family commitments, And I Steven Bradbury’ed it. WIN! Preparation began and the team was announced; Matt Norgrove (NSW), Wiz Fineron (NZ), Mayan Smith-Gobat (NZ) and I would be heading to the Getu Valley to climb some of the newest limestone routes in the world. Among such talent my role was clear: support logistically and belay hard.

TO GET MAYAN SMITH-GOBAT’S TAKE ON THE GETU ROCTRIP HEAD TO

the VL website

67

“Pictures do no justice to the beauty and atmosphere, let alone size of this place.

You could literally fly a Jumbo through the arch.”

The centrepiece of RocTrip 2011 was the enormous Chuanschang Arch, the ruins of an ancient underground river. It’s an incredible natural rock feature that almost defies comprehension. Pictures do no justice to the beauty and atmosphere, let alone size of this place. You could literally fly a Jumbo through the arch. Although I doubt China Southern will be adding this to their itinerary, they have recently added a direct flight from Sydney to Guangzhou, this would be our first leg...

Flight time 11 hours. Got to know Matt and Wiz a little better.

Lay over at Guangzhou Airport: three hours. Matt and Wiz got to know squat toilets. Delay at Guangzhou Airport, four hours. Flew to Guiyang, arrived 2am, met our transfer and rescued Italian wunderkind, Gabriel Moroni, sharing my room at the flash new Novotel. Woke up, had last ‘real’ breakfast, got in a taxi back to Guiyang Airport, faced death several times thanks to suicidal driver’s love of the wrong side of the road, arrived and rendezvoused with Petzl Team.

Then things got complicated.

Petzl’s Chinese liaison had a just-landed American contingent, sponsored athletes from other countries, some guys from FiveTen, us, and one very modest sized bus. For myself, Matt and Wiz this was the first time we would meet some of the world’s best climbers; Ethan Pringle, Joe Kinder, Lynn Hill, Sasha DiGulian, Dave Graham to name only a few. I was kind of awestruck and they all knew each other so well, what’s the etiquette? I’m back in Year 10, the new face at school and these are the cool kids. A friendly looking American girl smiled and took my picture, “Hi I’m Collette”. We made some introductions and it turns out these cool kids are actually super friendly, and minus big egos. There was time for one last meal, “Hey, there’s a KFC…” Somehow they find room for us all on the Petzl chartered bus.

I was up the back, next to the loud American (Dave Graham!).

It seemed a mammoth transit from the US had not dulled his enthusiasm and, I have to say, he made for a very entertaining journey. Dave is by far one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. His attention to the simple things that pass by most people un-noticed, and interpretation of the story behind these things, is not only entertaining but also kind of humbling.

At Getu village the people were warm and accommodating but knew no English. Petzl had booked most of the hotel rooms for their guests and they had gathered the best-of-the-best; Dani Andrada, Chris Sharma, Daila Ojeda, Steve McClure, Nina Caprez, Enzo Oddo, the Americans, quite a good showing of Aussies and so many more. That first night, I really didn’t know where to look.

Matt and Wiz were a good match and both found the climbing challenging – as the rock in the Arch seemed to give up its secrets less easily than the rest of the crags – but eventually rewarding.

Mayan Smith-Gobat joined us a day later and I spent most of my time bouncing between them, a friend from Perth, some of the Americans and a sponsored couple from Holland.

I managed to thrash my way up a couple of very modest routes. While it seemed nobody minded belaying a noob, I felt like I’d brought a Hyundai Getz to the F1 weekend in Monte Carlo. Still, with around 250 climbs between the various crags and offering every grade from 12 to 35, there was certainly something for everyone.

The final day was a celebration, an exhibition of climbing from the best in the world in one of the grandest theatres, the Chuanschang Arch. A 15-minute walk from Getu through stepped rice paddies and giant bamboo saw us arrive at the small river crossing. A wooden boat punted us across the narrow green void. On a clear autumn morning the sun breaks like golden torchlight through the Arch that dominates the skyline to your right…or so I’m told. The cloud never did lift when we were there. The next part of the walk is the reason no one goes back to the village for lunch, 1400 uneven steps zigzag up the hillside through the forest.

At the Arch we spotted Chris Sharma belaying Dani Andrada through his eight-pitch Corazon de Ensueno (8c/33). From the floor of the cave it rises up into the roof of tufas and hollows before breaking out onto the headwall, an ambitious line that took 11 days to clean and bolt.

Meanwhile Lynn Hill and Mayan Smith-Gobat were on the opposite side climbing Lost in Translation (8a+/30), the first route that reached the top of the Arch. Unsurprisingly, a dizzying array of ropes and photographers webbed the cave’s ceiling.

The day culminated in a large party in the centre of town. Cheap beer and solid tunes by inspirational Petzl athlete, climber, part-time DJ, filmmaker and fire twirler, Phillip Ribiere, had the crowd in a frenzy while some otherwise quiet characters exposed their less inhibited side on stage. A good night was had by all but perhaps this is one part of the event you will just have to see for yourself…at the next Petzl RocTrip.

LEFT Wiz Fineron and Matt Norgrove.

RIGHT A climber with the Great Arch looming above.

BOTTOM Wiz climbing Going With Buddha (7c+/28), Buddha Cave.

69

TOP LEFT Mayan escaping the crowds by getting up high BOTTOM LFT Matt on Going With Buddha (7c+/28), Buddha Cave.

BOTTOM RIGHT Matt and the Great Arch.

70

“Getu is a small, isolated little village surrounded by limestone cliffs that are just mind-blowing.

It’s hard to explain in writing just how much rock is in this area.”

MATT NORGROVE Chaotic roads that wind through never-ending limestone peaks; local families working away on their farms; rice with pork for dinner and noodles and egg for breakfast; and how could I forget the 250 sport routes that surround the Getu Valley in Guizhou Province, China?

In late-April last year, I received a phone call from my sponsors Spelean asking if I would be interested in attending the 2011 Petzl RocTrip. Considering I had never travelled overseas before and was being invited to a premier climbing destination, it’s pretty safe to say I was excited.

I had briefly seen pictures of the Great Arch that towered above Getu, but as to the style of the climbing there, that was anyone’s guess.

In the week before leaving for China, Wiz Fineron, a good friend from New Zealand, came and stayed with me in the Blue Mountains.

Apart from his snoring Wiz is the perfect companion. Beautiful spring weather in the Blue Mountains, climbing and coffee, what a combination. We got a little carried away climbing and before I left for Getu my hands looked like they had been through a meat grinder, luckily I would not be climbing anything for a few days.

On 23 October, skinless as Christmas turkeys, we flew to Guanzhou, the capital of Guizhou (the poorest province in China).

From there we took a short domestic flight to a small city called Guiyang (which is only about twice the size of Sydney).

Unfortunately, our flight was delayed meaning we did not arrive in Guiyang until 2am in the morning. Luckily, Spelean had

booked us in at the Novatel that night, which was sweet, if only for the king-sized buffet breakfast.

The next day Petzl organised a bus to take Team America and us to the Getu Valley. Getu is about a five-hour bus ride from Guiyang and the road winds and rolls through some incredible countryside.

Limestone peaks appeared from every angle, I was amazed at the amount of rock we had seen before even arriving at our destination.

Getu is a small, isolated little village surrounded by limestone cliffs that are just mind-blowing. It’s hard to explain in writing just how much rock is in this area. After checking in at our hotel rooms, we were invited to dinner where we all got to know one another and I was introduced to rice and Getu pork. The beer here is quite cheap 90 cents a bottle. You can buy a main course meal for a little under $4. That gives you an idea of how cheap it is in China.

The following week involved a lot of climbing in the great arch above Getu and at a separate crag called Banyangs Cave. Both cliffs are around 40 minutes walk from the village. Petzl had done an awesome job preparing the area and half a dozen other crags that surround Getu. Sloped limestone pockets and tufas covered the vertical walls of the cave, while the roof consisted of endless stalactites and phenomenal multipitch routes.

On average most of the pitches were 25m – 30m with the rare exception. Getu has an interesting style to say the least, the slippery limestone had many, including myself, puzzled for the first few days.

This didn’t stop Steve Mclure onsighting 8c/33 on his second day climbing in the valley. Petzl athletes were attempting the 9a/35 project on the main wall in the arch throughout the trip, despite wet crux holds and less than ideal conditions, Gabriel Moroni from Italy sent the route on his last day. Banyangs Cave was quite different, having one side, the left, steep and overhanging, while the right-hand side was 10 to 15-degrees overhanging on small edges, tufas and pockets. Wiz and I spent the majority of our time at this crag.

RocTrip was amazing, and I felt privileged to climb alongside some of the world’s best. For me, it was more than just climbing, it was also about soaking up the atmosphere, meeting new people and enjoying an amazing event. During the evenings, Petzl played short films and movies from Dani Andrada, Chris Sharma, Daila Ojeda and many more. The vibe just felt really cool, climbers from all around the world, in one spot for the same thing.

Getu was also a total culture shock. Putting the climbing aside, people there live what we would consider an extremely poor lifestyle. Although they live differently, the encounters I had with the locals were most pleasant, although we could not really understand each other. They went far out of there way To find out more visit

to accommodate us in many ways. It also made me realise how lucky we are to live in our small community, with clean, non-polluted crags. Although the climbing in Getu was great, I was shocked at the amount of rubbish on the sides of the roads and also at the crags. I was disappointed to think foreigners who had participated in this event had just dropped their rubbish on the ground.

Above all, the motivation I’ve gained from this trip is what I need to push myself that little bit harder. Giving it 110 per cent day in and day out is all that separates a good climber from a great climber.

It’s sometimes too easy to get carried away with results and ticking projects, but taking time out to soak up the atmosphere, enjoy the entertainment and have the opportunity to climb in such an incredible location is what the Petzl RocTrip is all about.

The goal of Petzl’s RocTrips is to discover new places and develop climbing. Anyone who can climb independently can sign up, participate and add to the event. Since its creation 10 years ago the Petzl RocTrip concept has created real and lasting benefits for climbers. For the areas it visits, the injection to the local economy and support to help with access and conservation issues will last long after the event has passed. Many thanks should also go to the army of route setters and volunteers.

www.petzl.com/en/outdoor/petzl-roctrip/china2011

FAR LEFT Joe Kinder distracts the onlookers as Dave Graham ninja-exits from Team Petzl’s bus.

LEFT A welcoming Getu local sees the funny side of the Roctripers.”

73

CHINA UNCOVERED

TOUTED AS INDIAN CREEK MEETS SANDSTONE SQUAMISH, THE NEWLY DEVELOPED LIMING COULD JUST WELL BECOME CHINA’S TRAD CLIMBING PARADISE. WE SPEAK TO ONE OF THE AREA’S MAIN DEVELOPERS, MIKE DOBIE. INTERVIEW Duncan Brown IMAGES Eben Farnworth

Rockclimbing as we know it first started in China when Todd Skinner bolted lines in Yangshuo in 1991. This inspired a wave of development, chiefly in Yangshuo, in Guanxi province, and more recently in the Getu Valley in Guizhuo province. The tone of development was thus set and the sport climbing ethic spread rapidly, so it wasn’t until 2010 that a few pioneers left the bolts behind in search of the trad climbing opportunities China has to offer.

They found what they were looking for in a small corner of Yunnan in southern China, in a sandstone Mecca called Liming. This small group of developers soon started a traditional climbing movement, quickly becoming the new old-school climbers as they put up amazing all-gear lines. We’ve been able to get a hold of Mike Dobie, the driving force behind Liming’s traditional climbing movement.

So the big rumours in the Chinese climbing scene these days mainly revolve around Yunnan and the development you and others are doing up there. Why is Yunnan so special?

Well being so geographically and culturally diverse, Yunnan is already a great place for travellers to visit. Elephants roam the jungles in the Province’s south, while the Himalayan uplift to the North is culturally part of Tibet. My team and I have been busy developing in northern Yunnan’s Laojunshan National Park,

7 4 CHINA UNCOVERED

which boasts mountains that reach 6700m and a wild assortment of plants and animals. Liming is a small town nestled in the park at 2100m, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs that reach more than 150m high.

So Liming, it’s meant to be endless red sandstone offering  a limitless supply of perfect crack lines, is it really as good as the rumours would have it?

Well, when we originally started here in 2010, I thought the area reminded me of Indian Creek. But after a few more trips it can be more accurately described as a sandstone Squamish because of its epic corners and straight-in cracks. Unlike Indian Creek, the crack systems tend to have a bit more character to them. Rather than 30m of the exact same size crack, you have to do more varied and interesting moves all in one climb as the width changes.

And the multipitch routes are great too.

ABOVE Geordie Yep climbing the superb Faraway Corner (5.11d/22), Liming.

75

CURRENTLY, THERE’S A TOTAL OF 106 ROUTES, WITH MOST OF THE DEVELOPMENT OCCURRING IN ONE MAJOR VALLEY, BUT THERE ARE AT LEAST EIGHT MORE VALLEYS OF ROCK THAT WE HAVEN’T EVEN BEGUN TO EXPLORE. WE ESTIMATE THERE TO BE AT LEAST 500 POTENTIAL ROUTES, BUT THERE COULD EASILY BE THOUSANDS.

7 6 CHINA UNCOVERED

LEFT The cliffs of Liming are said to be a cross between Squamish and Indian Creek.

RIGHT Mike Dobie on the stellar second pitch of Back to Primitive (5.11d/24)

2011. They put up six or so routes, one of them the hardest traditional line in China. This climb, Air China, went free at 5.13d (31). Currently, there’s a total of 106 routes, with most of the development occurring in one major valley, but there are at least eight more valleys of rock that we haven’t even begun to explore.

We estimate there to be at least 500 potential routes, but there could easily be thousands. As for access, the local park officials in Liming are supportive of climbers. Every person needs to buy a entrance ticket for 80 RMB ($A12). We have heard that in the future climbers will need to sign a waiver of liability before climbing here, but as of now this is just a rumour.

Any routes that you consider area classics?

Any interesting stories about the development process?

One of the coolest discoveries we’ve made is that climbing has been going on here for perhaps centuries. The local minority, the Lisu people, found very creative ways to get up the walls in search of bees’ and birds’ nests. We have run across ancient ladders made out of tree branches that reach almost 30m up the walls. We’ve also found evidence of humans as high as 70m. It’s always quite a surprise when you think you’re on a first ascent and you run into old ladders and holes in the walls. So much for being the first...

We’ve sat with the older Lisu people and they’ve explained their ‘tradition’ of climbing. We don’t feel very bold bringing modernday equipment to the game compared to these guys. But they are very supportive of us as we are fellow climbers, and they recognise that the tradition we bring has a different goal and is pushing climbing to greater heights.

What has been done up there so far? How many routes have been put up compared to the potential of the place? What is the local access situation like?

My team and I started developing the area in the winter of 2010-11 and so far we’ve put up over 95 pitches, ranging in difficulty from 5.5 to 5.12+ (grade 6 to 25+), with a mix of single and multipitch.

The area was also visited by Matt Segal and his team in November

The single pitch classics include the Great Owl (5.9/17), Dancing with Dragons (5.10d/21), Scarface II (5.11a/22), The Quest (5.11c/23), The Faraway Corner (5.11c/23), The Boving Reflection (5.12-/24), The Reckoning (5.12/25), and the area’s hardest established route Air China. Of the multipitch routes the best are Soul’s Awakening (5.10/19), Back to the Primitive (5.11d/24), and the project Wind of the North, which we haven’t freed yet, but will probably go at 5.12c/27.

How would a travelling climber go about adding Liming to their China trip?

Check out our guidebook at junshanclimber.com It’s free and has everything you’ll need. The website is a hub for the Liming and Dao Cheng climbing community, as well as a source for all the information my team publishes. It’s maintained by Eben Farnworth, a fellow team member, developer, photographer and climbing guide.

What’s the best season?

Either March to June or October to November. The summer months from July through September see heavy monsoonal rain.

Climbing would be spotty at best. December, January, and February are the coldest months, but usually the driest. Nights are cold, but during the day you can climb comfortably in the sun and in the shade with a jacket.

Xiao Young on The Quest (5.11c/23), Liming.

How do you get there?

Is the intention of Liming to be completely bolt free?

The first step is travelling to Lijiang, Yunnan. It shouldn’t be too hard because Lijiang is the number one tourist destination in China. You can fly direct to the city from all major Chinese cities or get there by train. It’s also a very easy trip from Yangshuo. Once you arrive in Lijiang there are a number of ways to get to Liming outlined in the guidebook. While in Liming, my team stays at the Faraway Hotel, but there are a few other options you can try.

We have been bolting anchors, mostly for abseiling only, leaving traditional anchors for most top roping and top belaying. The ethics of the area state you can place bolts on a climb for abseiling and safety reasons. Most of the climbs are all trad, but a few have the odd bolt. Our resources have only provided expansion bolts and we encourage developers coming to use glue-ins.

Gear beta? What do you need up there? How long of a rope?

What sort of rack?

Primarily cams. My personal rack has Camalots and TCUs from micro to six inches, with multiples of each. There are also splitter pitches that will take as many as four of the same size. If you are a moderate trad climber you could get by with a rack of Camalots from .3 to 5, but if you are looking to push your grades past 5.10 (21+) bring more small gear. Also a set of nuts and slings will do you well. A 60m rope will be fine for most of the routes.

7 8 CHINA UNCOVERED

Thanks so much for all the help buddy, you guys are doing outstanding work to open amazing new areas, nurture and grow the Chinese climbing scene and I for one salute you for it.

See you in Liming soon!

Thank you Duncan, you rock, and we hope that everyone enjoys the routes! We would like to thank our sponsors Kailas and Black Diamond for their support for this year’s development trips.

Visit the website for team updates and new areas we are developing.

junshanclimber.com

VERTICAL LIFE’S NEW ZEALAND EDITOR, TOM HOYLE AKA GOMEZ GARCIA GONZALEZ, PROVING THE DIET OF REFRIED BEANS IS WORKING ON RITUAL DE LO HABITUAL (23), WALL OF SOUND, MT RUAPEHU, NEW ZEALAD. IMAGES John Palmer 79

Ewen Sinclair getting big air off Seamonsters (V7), apparently Wellington’s best boulder problem, Turakirae Head, New Zealand.

8 0 NZ FOLIO Images by John Palmer

Jonathon Clearwater wearing the grimace-smile as he unleashes the beast on his Burning Man project, now climbed at grade 30, White Falls, Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand.

81

JAMES ‘ALL-STYLES’ FIELD-MITCHELL ATTEMPTS BETA RECONNAISSANCE ON THE MAJESTIC CHARLATAN PROJECT, WHITE FALLS, MT RUAPEHU, NZ. 8 2 FOLIO Image by Tom Hoyle

83

8 4 FOLIO Image by Nick Fletcher

LEFT Holgar Moeller on the sandbag Keep Your Helmet On (V3), The Trenches, The Balkans, Sydney TOP Holgar Moeller checking If the Shoe Fits (V8), The Frontline, The Balkans, Sydney BOTTOM Ben Cossey with textbook fixed-stare and flexing-guns

AUTHOR & IMAGES Rob Baker

GOING SOLO ON MT KENYA

8 6 IMAGE Old Moses Hut, Mt Kenya

I couldn’t sleep. Every possible scenario was running through my mind in a mixture of anticipation and excitement. In a few hours I would be climbing the 800m North Face of Mt Kenya alone, drawing on years of accumulated experience to not just succeed but to survive.

These emotions were familiar companions before a big climb. Many previous summit days had followed sleepless nights; the only difference was this time I would be without a partner to share the climbing, the routefinding and the experience. It was my time, my experience. In a few hours I would be doing what I had been planning for months.

In July last year I travelled to East Africa with the goals of climbing Mt Kenya (5199m) and Mt Kilimanjaro (5900m) and in the process experiencing some of Africa. In terms of climbing, Mt Kenya held the most appeal. It’s a beautiful rocky mountain capped by the twin peaks of Nelion (5188m) and Batian (5199m).

It has a rich climbing history with technical routes on both rock and ice. Friends from Adelaide had visited in 2008 and climbed the Standard North Face route on Batian in three days and raved about it and the mountain’s flora and fauna.

On the first day, we squeezed into a local bus for four hours in moderately crazy traffic to make the journey from Nairobi to Nanyuki, near the base of Mt Kenya and the start of the Sirimon Route. The following day, we picked up our porters and begin the two-day walk twards the North Face and Shipton’s Hut (4200m).

Mt Kenya was visible for most of the walk in, soaring into the sky and looking rather intimidating. Setting out from the hut the next day, Kate and I acclimatised by trekking up Point Lenana (4985m), the peak most visitors to Mt Kenya climb.

It had been a year since I’d been in the mountains, climbing, exploring and pushing body and mind beyond their normal limits.

This is what I come to the mountains for – that intensity so often missing from everyday life.

87

The alarm sounded at 4.30am. I scoffed some breakfast and five cups of tea, shouldered my pack and began the one-hour approach to the base of the route through the pre-dawn gloom. Light filled the sky as I began climbing at 6.20am, carrying only a litre of water, some chocolate bars, energy gels and a light down jacket. I had a 60m, 8mm rope, some wires and a few cams to protect myself while climbing or to allow safe retreat if the fear took me.

I have long been fascinated by the experience of soloing on rock and ice, and have regularly soloed long routes at Araps and shorter routes on the solid gritstone crags of England’s Peak District.

I feel quite comfortable up to grade 15. Soloing easy routes allows a reasonable margin of safety and evokes a cerebral experience akin to meditation. There’s nothing to worry about but the rock and the moves, the focus of making sure every one is 100 per cent solid, no ropes or gear to distract you.

The first eight pitches had moves up to grade 15 on mostly solid rock following a gully system that led into a big amphitheatre on the North Face. After an hour and a half, I clambered into the amphitheatre, psyched to be moving fast and way ahead of schedule. I was at nearly 5000m and feeling strong. My detailed route description led me up the hard variation of the crux, Firmin’s Tower. I uncoiled the rope and dragged it behind me rather than carry dead weight on my back.

Despite the guide, route-finding was a little confusing, so I followed my instincts and the odd bit of fixed gear. Every move

was deliberate and positive, the years of climbing and soloing paying off. I slowed as the difficulty increased. My senses were heightened and concentration left no room for fear. As I climbed the amazing cracks for 150m up Firmin’s Tower, I leapfrogged cams attached to daisy chains to protect the grade-18 climbing.

The weather was holding and it was only 11am when I reached the top of the Tower, where I came across some peanut shells left by the previous party on the route. I knew this was their high point after a 24-hour day. I felt in total control and kept moving, intermittently forcing myself to drink water and suck gels.

After Firmin’s Tower a few more pitches led to the summit ridge and some exposed climbing toward the summit of Batian, still another 400m away. Route-finding proved challenging because the safest and fastest route weaved across the ridge between pinnacles and along ice-covered ledges. From the ridge, I could see in every direction.

The South Face was covered in ice and snow; treacherous and foreboding without crampons and ice tools.

After traversing along some easy ledges I came to the most exposed part of the route; the traverse of Shipton’s Notch, which involved some extremely exposed moves across a short wall blessed with hundreds of metres of air below it. This was followed by a ten-metre-long narrow cheval ridge, so narrow I had to shuffle along with a leg either side. With amazing 360-degree vistas, the exposure was incredible.

With only Kate and a few people watching my progress from the hut 1000m below, I had the entire mountain to myself.

IMAGE The vantage from Firmin’s Tower, with Shipton’s Hut just visible on the distant ground. 8 9

9 0 IMAGE Basecamp at the foot of My Keny

I arrived at the summit around 12.30pm, relieved, but not relaxed; I still had the descent to negotiate. The nearby summit of Nelion seemed very close. Photos are a poor simulacra of the panorama, unable to capture the profound experience, but I snapped a few anyway to record the moment. During intense experiences, the mind blocks out seemingly irrelevant or trivial occurrences and it is only afterwards when looking back on the photos, however inadequate they are, that I can recall and appreciate those otherwise lost moments.

I began the descent in in a state of complete concentration, a combination of scrambling and abseiling off pitons and old pieces of cord. Switched into auto pilot mode, the motions of descent became mechanical. Setup. Check. Double check.

It wasn’t over till I was back on the ground.

Abseiling down Firmin’s Tower back to the amphitheatre required some rope-stretching abseils as more than once I only just reached the next set of anchors. On the last abseil into the amphitheatre, I accidentally kicked a huge block of rock, it wobbled, then teetered, then fell onto the excess rope lying on the ground. This caused me some concern. Most of the rope I needed to safely descend now lay pinned under a two-tonne boulder.

By some stroke of luck, there was a fine layer of dirt over the ground and I could pull all the rope out from under the sheet of rock.

I continued descending, scrambling and abseiling further into the amphitheatre and then gully, arriving at the base of the

climb at 4.30pm, a bit tired but happy, relieved and satisfied.

I spent a few minutes alone there, absorbing the experience before Kate and some tourists walked up to meet me.

It was strange seeing people again after my solo adventure and it brought reality back quickly. It had been a long day of continuous concentration and exertion, those essential components of a rich, unadulterated experience. It always takes a few days, weeks or sometimes months for the experience and adventure to sink in. After more than 18 years of climbing, I have realised I need those intense adventures to renew my psyche and maintain balance in a busy lifestyle, and combining it with travel in new countries and meeting new people makes the journey that little bit more rewarding.

As the years progress, finding such intense experiences becomes more difficult and seems to require more risk.

Finding balance is always a challenge.

After a safari to see the animals in the Masai Mara and Lake Nakura national parks, we walked up Mt Kilimanjaro (5900m). We did it with a few other tourists, most of who were unaware the more beautiful and inspiring mountain of Mt Kenya, and its promise of amazing adventure, were only a few hours north. When I look back now, the solo of Mt Kenya stands out as an incredibly vivid experience. Sure, the memories will dull with time, but the balance was restored, if only temporarily •

A (worthless) essay subjecting you to the subject of subjective grading.

or just plain WORDS Steve Kelly

?

92

It seems it has taken 22 years to confirm what most people, including the first ascentionist, already knew: that Hubble, the world’s first 8c+ (34), is indeed the same grade as Action Direct (9a/35).

Now that some visiting Euros and Americans have sampled the line (the White Peak is a bit of a backwater when it comes to vacation spots), some sort of confirmation has now been officially raised, especially since wunderkind Adam Ondra spent three sessions on the route without success.

This has led to the inevitable (and controversial) question: was Hubble the world’s first 9a?

Ben Moon put up Hubble at Raven Tor (UK) in 1990. The line famously consisted of an English 7b move followed by four English 7a moves.

In today’s money it has been better described as seven moves (V13) into a grade 28 finish. All up, 10m. Although it may well sound like a path, in 22 years it has had only four repeats. These have been mostly by people that have lived in a cupboard training on a wooden model of the route while subsisting on a diet of steamed broccoli.

Back in the ‘90s Moon argued the point that many European and even American routes were starting to be overgraded relative to their older counterparts. Moon tried to explain relative grading by citing the differences between two routes in the same grade, using Theoreme (8b) and La Rose et la Vampire (8b) as prime examples (both at Buoux in France). He explained that “just because a route felt harder than the other, didn’t mean it was a whole grade harder” – which, if you thought about it for long enough, gave you a headache.

Nowadays there seems to be a lot of merit to his argument. Lots of the old-school crags - such as Buoux, Orgon, Volx, the Verdon Gorge and, of course, Raven Tor) contain what many consider to be ‘stiff’ grades. These stiff grades – or at least the speculation that they are now stiff compared to more modern climbs of the same rating – are due to one event: ‘The AD Effect.’

The AD Effect (Action Direct Effect) came about supposedly as a result of Wolfgang Gullich’s autobiographer Tilmann Hepp using some creative license in his book Life in the Vertical, when he stated that Wolfy’s 1991 Frankenjura test piece was in fact French 9a. This went against the man’s original grading of UIAA XI, which if you could find a translator, looked a lot like 8c+, the same grade as Hubble.

As a result, the grading of a route became determined by whether it was BAD (Before Action Direct) or RAD (Relative to Action Direct). The BAD routes remained in places like Raven Tor, Pen Trwyn, Buoux, Volx, Orgon Canal and the Verdon Gorge. RAD routes meanwhile started popping up all over Spain, America and even Thailand. Soon it became evident that BAD 8cs in places such as the UK were remaining unrepeated, while RAD 9as in Spain were being put up every week by teenagers sponsored by McDonalds. Something was amiss.

Down here in Australia the tide was turning as well, mainly due to a small group of people from NSW that had visited the UK and seen for themselves what it was like to be BAD. This led to the Nowra movement, a period during which numerous routes were established that reflected being very BAD indeed. (It is no coincidence that this took place around 1992, one year after the first ascent of Action Direct).

Conversely, a number of Victorians headed for the USA instead and returned with visions of creating routes that were utterly RAD. This explains why a Nowra grade 29 feels more like a Grampians’ 30 (though the former looks like a pile by comparison). And so the AD Effect had spread…

Today the problem is so rife that entire crags have become infected by the AD Effect, hence the constant grade bickering that occurs amongst climbers in campsites or on dodgy Internet forums.

Where once there was consensus and relativity, there is now just confusion. This is not limited to the hardest grades either, as generally a 1977 grade 22 can be found to be somewhat harder than a 2002 grade 22. If you’re in any doubt, go and try Light Fingered (Arapiles) and then (after a long car drive) have a spin on Ruddy Norry (Blue Mountains). All should become clear after that.

Compounding this problem are the people who want to forever be BAD yet run over to Spain and tick as many RAD routes as possible. These climbers then return to places such as Taipan Wall and put up things like The Groove Train and grade it 8c. It is only when one of those RAD American climbers visits our shores and jumps on the same line that the truth comes out. If it was in the kingdom of RAD, it’d probably be 9a.

So what is to be done about the problem? Well, in many respects, it is sorting itself out – although only gradually. RAD routes are still getting repeated en mass while BAD routes aren’t receiving half as much attention. Just the other day a BAD route from 1987 had its first repeat, prompting the second ascentionist to immediately call for an upgrade. But that was in Austria you understand, so most people are agreeing with him. Meanwhile over in Wales a line that went unrepeated for 17 years recently had its second ascent as well – yet despite being graded HXS 7a/b it’s not getting upgraded (probably because no one really knows what that means anyway).

The telling tale however is not so much in the upgrading; it’s in the language of climbers worldwide, as in: “Wow! That is one RAD route!”, or, “Damn! That route was BAD!” Or, more commonly, “That route was BAD-ASS!” The latter apparently can be defined as, “Before Action Direct – After ‘70s Sandbagging.” •

INTERVIEW Duncan Brown IMAGES Craig Ingram

Expat Aussie, training-guru and all-round nice guy Duncan Brown is making his mark in China’s booming climbing scene. This is his first article in a series in which he tells us what it takes to condition yourself for a life in the vertical.

THE WHYS

GOAL SETTING

At some point all of us want to improve our performance and, as there is no quick-fix climbing Viagra, inevitably we look to training.

But what makes us want to improve in the first place? And what exactly does ‘training’ entail?

First, goal setting. Training towards set goals gives you the drive and focus to push through difficult sessions and stick to a structured plan. As I mentioned earlier, we are all different and have different motivations but in effect we all want the same end result – to climb better. The differing goals make ‘climbing better’ mean something different to everyone. The main thing is to try and clarify your goal, then target your training to zero in on it.

The motivations are easy to pinpoint. That elusive project we’ve been working all year, that upcoming trip to our dream climbing destination, or even just wanting to one-up your mates at the gym – all are legitimate reasons to want to improve. But how does the average person make this happen?

We’ve all seen videos of superhuman machines doing endless one-arm chins, thousands of laps on brutally steep walls and laughing at gravity with effortless front-levers. The unfortunate corollary is that most of us think unless that is what we are doing, we aren’t ‘training’.

Folks, this isn’t the case. Firstly, most would be broken inside a week if we tried to emulate such Olympian efforts and, secondly, most people aren’t 34 climbers trying to break the magical grade 35 so we don’t have to go to such extreme lengths to improve. Still, there are things we can all learn from the pros.

Pro and semi-pro athletes don’t run about randomly doing things in the hope they will get better. They set out a deliberate training plan that targets an ultimate goal. This mindset is something everyone can bring to their training, and will lead to more rapid improvement and realisation of goals. And success only increases motivation. What you get is not a vicious cycle but a victorious one.

In this article we’ll look at the steps from initially making the decision to train to actually stepping into the gym for that first session.

Do you want to go up a boulder grade? Onsight endurance routes a grade or two harder than last season? Do more volume so you can tick more classics in a short holiday next autumn? Goals are unique to each individual.

One important thing to remember is to not shoot too high in the short term. For example, a climber redpointing 18 this season probably shouldn’t set their main goal for next season as onsighting 33. That’s not going to happen. Simply put, keep your goals realistic and you will be more likely to realise them, and that will give you more motivation to push on to ever higher levels. Goals need to be achievable.

As well as articulating a long-term goal, include several smaller goals as steps along the way. For example, take Mr Climbero, who this year redpointed several 24s and onsighted some 21s. His goal for next year is to tick his first 25 and onsight 23. Now being a good goal setter, on the path to glory he has his sights set on onsighting 22, onsighting multiple 21s in a day and redpointing multiple 24s in a day. All of these are achievable goals that will maintain motivation on his way to the big prize of 25.

Set a long-term goal, supported by short-term targets to chase along the way, and you will both structure a better training plan and keep your psych up.

95

“IT TAKES TIME, DEDICATION, CONSISTENCY AND PATIENCE TO REAP THE REWARDS OF ANY TRAINING PLAN BUT EACH OF US CAN BENEFIT FROM BETTER TIME-MANAGEMENT, A GOAL-ORIENTED APPROACH AND A LITTLE BIT OF DISCIPLINE IN OUR WORKOUT SESSIONS.”

EVALUATION: SKILLS, TIME, ASSETS Second up – self-evaluate. Honest self-evaluation is key as it provides the foundation on which to target training.

Ask yourself what your current skill level is, what assets are at your disposal (gyms, hangboards, training partners, etc) and, crucially, how much time and energy you can and are willing to devote to training.

Most of this is easy. Time; forward plan with a calendar by marking out available training times. Assets; do you have a hangboard or yoga mat, Thera-bands and weights, at home?

Is there a gym or home woody nearby? Partners; do you have friends (even friends of convenience) keen on structured sessions or are you on a solo mission? Current skill level, though, that’s tricky.

Boasting about redpointing grade Y and onsighting grade X might be a good way to impress your latest romantic target, but it’s not a tangible way of measuring your current physical ability. That’s not to say grades don’t factor into self- assessment, rather they are not clear enough to measure incremental improvement as the steps from grade X to grade Y can be big and may take some time to make.

A general fitness test is a much more reliable yardstick of improvement over time. A decent fitness test for a climber needs to cover a range of different aspects of physical performance in order to be of any value.

Here’s an example of measurable factors – both climbingspecific and general fitness – to use in assessing yourself before making your training plan and then, later, to measure gains.

1. Max chin-ups.

2. Max duration of hang on medium-sized hangboard hold X. 3. Find the smallest hangboard hold you can hold for a minimum of six seconds.

4. Endurance – use a consistent, gently overhung route at the crag or gym, a grade below your onsight level, and lap it to failure measuring the number completed.

5. Max push-ups.

6. Max burpees in two minutes.

7. Max V-sits in two minutes.

8. Flexibility – measure your toe-touch distance, high-step height, front- and side-splits distance.

This is just an example of a fitness test and you can tailor it to suit your needs, but just remember to include all the aspects we will be training such as power, endurance, flexibility, core strength and general fitness.

With the fitness test in the bag, you can look at your results and make a proper assessment of your current state and, using that alongside time and assets, you can start looking at how to construct an effective training plan. Remember though, you can lie to everyone but yourself – the key here is honesty.

WRITING A TRAINING PLAN Having set goals and stared hard into the self-assessment mirror, it’s training plan time. The first thing to do is grab a calendar and mark the times you have available to train and where those sessions will be.

Let’s return to Mr Climbero and walk him through making a training plan. Mr Climbero wants to improve a couple of sport grades. Like most of us he is cursed with working nine-to-five, Monday to Friday. He has some free mornings and evenings and can get to the crag two or three weekends a month. He marks in his calendar a one-hour hangboard and Thera-band session at home on Monday and Wednesday mornings and a climbing gym session on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He also locks in the cragging weekends and on those that he can’t get out, he commits to a Saturday gym session.

His training schedule could look something like this: Monday Morning – Cardio, Core and Flexibility session Tuesday Night – Gym Session Wednesday Morning – Fingerboard and Cross-Training Session Thursday Evening – Gym Session Weekends – Either climbing at the crag or a gym session The need to manage your time effectively can not be overstated.

This doesn’t mean only identifying time for training sessions but - and here’s the rub - also articulating what you do during that session.

At the moment Mr Climbero’s gym sessions are unstructured.

He rocks up with his friends and haphazardly does some routes and boulders. Sound familiar? That’s because the normal person’s ‘training’ session goes like this: bumble about a little bit to warm up, play around with your mates on boulders or routes until you’re burnt out, then maybe do a token stretch. This is not an effective use of time, nor is it training.

All good training sessions follow a similar trajectory, including a light cardio warm-up, a warm-up stretch, gradual build-up towards our target workout focus, a warm-down and a cool-down stretch.

This should be laid out in your mind before you begin, then make sure you stick to it. Use your time to derive maximse benefit.

Naturally what your goals are and what your existing strengths and weaknesses are will decide what you are training in any given session. Over the coming issues we will go into the hows of training power, endurance, or the oxymoronic-to-non-climbers power endurance. The main thing is to target specifically towards your objectives. Keep your eyes on the prize.

One caveat - many fall into the trap of going too hard too early.

It’s easy to get excited about a new training plan and go at it like a bull at a gate only to give up within a fortnight because it’s all too much. Start by rethinking your existing training sessions to make them more effective, then as you settle into your routine add extra sessions. Build volume and intensity incrementally.

RE-EVALUATION So, how do we know if it’s working?

Of course, ticking your project is a good sign, and you can use your intermittent goals as markers of improvement along the way, but you can also regularly re-test yourself against your original fitness tests.

HEAD TO THE VERTICAL LIFE WEBSITE for an all-killer-nofiller workout complete with a how-to video.

Keep a simple training diary and re-test yourself every few weeks to discern if you are steadily improving or stagnating. If you’re not improving or, worse, going backwards you need to look at your training plan and re-evaluate its effectiveness. Over-training and not resting enough? Training the wrong aspect of your climbing (eg. building endurance when you really want to boulder harder)?

Training plans are dynamic. They require constant analysis, revisiting and tweaking to adjust for what is and is not working.

It takes time, dedication, consistency and patience to reap the rewards of any training plan but each of us can benefit from better time-management, a goal-oriented approach and a little bit of discipline in our workout sessions. To break it down: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

98

Set your goals.

Evaluate your skills, assets and time.

Lay out a training calendar with available sessions.

Plan each session to use your time productively.

Reassess regularly and make adjustments where necessary.

Reap the benefits of a more focused training plan!

BONUS: THE ONE-HOUR KILLER SESSION The following is a one-hour training session you can do at home with nothing but a hangboard, or at least a chin-up bar and an edge to use for the endurance program. Not essential but helpful would also be a yoga mat, a skipping rope and a Thera-band.

This little workout packs a big punch and can be done any time I like to use this sort of thing in the mornings or as a quick blast when I have a busy day and can’t unleash a full training session.

There are six parts to the workout that in turn warm you up, stretch you, work your entire body both in climbing-specific and general conditioning ways and then warm you down. That’s all the ingredients for a killer all-round workout for the climber on the go right there. All the workouts, with descriptions and videos, are at: www.athletebychoice.blosgspot.com • Five minutes of cardio (skipping, jogging, jumping jacks, exercise bike – anything, so long as it’s nice and steady).

• Five minutes of yoga / stretching (a few rounds of Sun Salutations if you know how or a simple series of light stretches to limber big muscle groups like calves, quads, hamstrings, back, shoulders and chest).

• 10 minutes – 60 chin-up program. Set a timer and do three chin-ups every 30 seconds for 10 minutes for a total of 60

pull-ups. If three is too many, start with one every 30 seconds, build to two as you get stronger, then three, then four when that’s too easy, then five, then...

• 15 minutes – hangboard endurance program. Use a medium-sized hold and hang it with both hands with your feet up on a chair out in front of you. Hold this for one minute, then rest for 30 seconds and repeat 10 times. Use a hold that allows you to stay on for the full minute. Make sure you’re feeling well pumped after the first few sets but can still make 10.

• 20 minutes - Total Circuit. A Total Circuit is a whole-body strength and conditioning workout. There is a special one in this article’s accompanying video for you to try out or you can choose any of the killer circuits from the site. Basically, progress through the 10 exercises, completing as many reps as you can in a minute, then go through again for a 20-minute workout.

• Five minutes yoga / stretching. As for the warm-up either yoga or light stretching as a cool-down.

There you have it. Everyone can find a spare hour somewhere in their week and turn a small time window into a killer session that will produce results. Now go get it! •

NEW GEAR 1 0 0 GEAR REVIEWS

PETZL ELIA In the bad old days the outdoor industry used to refer to creating women’s gear as ‘pinking and shrinking’. No more. Now nearly all companies purposely create gear for women. And so it goes with the Petzl Elia, a new, women-specific helmet.

Built along similar lines to the Elios (a unisex model), the Elia is sized for the smaller heads of women (52-58cm headband).

But its biggest innovation is for those with long hair, what Petzl is calling the OMEGA headband system: essentially the headband has been designed so that you can stick a pony-tail out the back.

This makes the Elia suitable not only for women, but for longhaired hippies and Fabio-types.

Instead of having the adjustment dial at the back like the Elios (where your pony-tail would go), on the Elia the dials have been shifted to the sides of the helmet, where you can easily adjust it to get a perfect fit. Like the Elios, the helmet sits low, so you don’t look like a mushroom head. The Elia comes in one size (285g) and two colours: white and violet (which looks suspiciously pink to us).

WATCH a video about the helmet.

Petzl Elia RRP$119.95

petzl.com.au

101

BLACK DIAMOND FLIGHT HARNESS BD has just dropped their latest high-performance harness, the Flight is designed for either the modern bolt-clipping sport climber or those whose missions are very long and very lightweight.

Despite its light weight, the Dual Core XP construction technique used to put the Flight together makes for comfortable hanging if on your project you are reduced from tickage to dogage. Mondo gear loops afford big racking space, bombshell abrasion patches add durability, the pre-threaded speed adjust waistbelt makes putting the Flight on idiot-proof and extra attention has been paid to the leg loops, which sport their own patented adjustment, the trakFIT system. In this case punctuation is important, it’s Flight over flight any day.

Black Diamond Flight Harness RRP $109.95 Distributed by Sea to Summit 1800 787 677 1 0 2 GEAR REVIEWS

blackdiamondequipment.com

PRANA BRONSON PANT Sources tell us that the Bronson Pant from prAna is ‘The Sharma’s’ goto pant. ‘Nuff said really. We could end this review here.

But we won’t.

The search for the perfect climbing pant is eternal, but in the Bronson you might find something approximating it. These pants are made from an abrasion-resistant micro-sanded (you can just imagine the dwarves wielding their little micro-sanders, singing Oompa-Loompa chain gang songs) canvas fabric (98 per cent cotton and a crucial two per cent Spandex). They have a gusseted crotch and a small amount of stretch for those delicate high-steps, five pockets and come in three colours: cargo green, charcoal and khaki.

These ones are sadly not pre-worn by The Sharma, but apparently they can be picked up on eBay if you are a true Sharma stalker.

METOLIUS MAGNUM CRASHPAD Pads have a simple remit, to stop your easily broken body from crashing into unforgiving ground. Given this it makes sense then to max-out the amount of ground a mat covers. The grandly named Metolious Magnum takes this as its maxim so that unbundled it has about the same sprawling footprint as Greater Melbourne.

With numbers like 122cm x 169cm x 10cm it makes a particularly fine choice for the solo explorer who gets up high sans-spotter and wants a generous target to lob off onto. She’s big in the carrying department though so be careful with it on your back in strong wind that it doesn’t morph into a sail and sweep you up and out of Kansas.

On the plus side, one bonus of its bigness is you don’t need to take a mattress to the crag to get in your mid-arvo nap in supreme comfort.

The Magnum is durable and has all the expected bells and whistles in the form of inner and outer pockets, shoe wiping mat and thickly padded shoulder straps. Go big with the Magnum Maxi-cure for loneliness.

prAna Bronson Pant RRP $99.95

Metolius Magnum Crashpad RRP $479 Distributed by Climbing Anchors (02) 6658 6063

expeditionequipment.com.au

metoliusclimbing.com

103

CLIMB POINT PERP Point Perpendicular is the kind of place where the routes linger long in the memory; cracks, faces and aretes climbed above the churning sea far below. On my first trip there as a 16-year-old I remember spending most of my time feeling terrified, but on later trips I learned to love it, and when the Point Perp bug bites, it bites hard. Of course, the problem with climbing at Point P was that the routes were bloody hard to find, particularly because you are always above the cliff rather than below it, and the old guide was sadly lacking in that modern necessity, the photo topo.

But all that ends with Robert Dun’s lovingly put together Climb Point Perp. As you can find in our interview with Dun on page 108, to get the necessary images for the topos he took the skies, shooting images from a light plane. The result is a much more user-friendly guide that allows routes to be easily located – these alone make the guide worth buying.

Aside from the addition of photo topos, clearly a huge amount of knowledge has been translated into the book. If a route receives stars or a caution symbol then there is a short note saying why; useful information at a place like Point P where the routes are often ‘adventurous’. I also like the short sections at the start of the guide describing the various styles of the main route developers – like artists having a particular style, the key new routers at Point P all have their own signature style, from the ‘Choss Masters’ Ian Brown and Peter Blunt to the more modern approach of the author and his partner Ivan Valenta. Other than that, the design of the guide is simple, but clean, and it is illustrated with lots of nice photos that will help you get inspired.

Point Perpendicular has been lacking such a great guide for a long time, and there is no doubt that it will inspire a lot of people to visit or revisit one of Australia’s great sea cliffs. ­— Ross Taylor

By Robert Dun Robert Dun, 2011 / RRP $39.95 1 0 4 BOOK REVIEW

www.pointperp.com

FULL OF MYSELF Climbing is a strange way to spend your free time. It has no clear set of rules, or scoreboard. Participation is not dictated by financial means, police-checked records or private school attendance. It entices an incredible spread of the mentally sound and mentally unstable into a common pastime. If climbing were colour, it would be a box of smarties.

Not surprisingly then there lies the same variety of stories, some of them legendary campfire stories of the utmost brilliance. Enter Johnny Dawes, British climbing legend. His most famous year in terms of climbing exploits was 1986, when he established Britain’s hardest traditional leads, culminating in his ascent of The Indian Face in Wales. Yet this book is not just about climbing. It’s a self-analysis of sorts and the title speaks volumes.

The book shines with passages such as the original text of the Indian Face saga, written by Dawes a week after the ascent, and insights into the mindset that enables a 30m runout above a RURP tied off with two millimetre cord.

Move by move descriptions, reflections on why a particular shift in body weight didn’t work or why cornering a car into a hairpin with the extra weight of two German hitchhikers made it unsustainable are all part of the package.

Then there’s the history, tales that have become climbing folklore.

The rivalry between ‘The Beast’ (John Redhead) and himself; the mid-80s scene in Stoney Middleton; hiking into Strone Ulladale (Outer Hebrides) armed with a schoolboy’s suitcase, 100kg of gear and a bottle of White Horse Whiskey; travelling to India with Joe Simpson to try the West Face of Bhagarathi III; day-trip soloing on the Troll Wall in Norway.

The writing itself is not penned by your average novelist. Like the subject, it is supremely colourful, creative and at times just plain bizarre, but this is what makes this book so special. It’s like sitting down to a cup of tea with the man himself.

Many of the photos are truly inspiring. One image which epitomises Dawes’ level of commitment is the classic shot by Neil Foster of him onsight soloing ‘Velvet Silence’ at Black Rocks in 1986 in poor conditions. No tell-tale chalk, no holds, no rope, and a light sheen of lichen covering the holdless slab.

This is a book written by no ordinary climber, containing a life’s supply of un-ordinary events. Like some of Johnny’s climbs, it will not appeal to everyone, yet to some it will be a masterpiece. Johnny wrote in his final account of his Indian Face ascent: “Gawt’s Indian Face is climbed. I can rest and feel proud.” He should feel the same about this book. ­— Steve Kelly

by Johnny Dawes Johnny Dawes Books, 2011 / RRP $25

Johnnydawes.com

BOOK REVIEW 1 0 5

CLIMBING DICTIONARY

by Matt Samet The Mountaineers Books, 2011 / RRP US$14.95

www.mountaineersbooks.org Whether peaking out on shiny new gear, one-upping each other over flickering campfires, planning dream trips or deciphering route descriptions, we climbers use a huge number of specialist words to describe our pursuit.

Some stuff even lay non-climbers should know – granite vs sandstone, for example – but often they don’t. There are false friends; bomber is not a WWII plane, flash is not an act of sexual depravity, Elvis leg is not the lewd gyration of a fat singer and ground fall, well actually, a ground fall really is as shit as it sounds – falling and hitting the ground. Some stuff everyone pretends to understand so they don’t look stupid, like the oxymoronic power endurance, yet even then you need to know what you are pretending to know about in order to pretend convincingly. Every subculture has its complex and rich lexicon of exclusionary jargon that has outsiders scratching their scones in bewilderment. Climbing is no different.

Language is important because it’s what we use to describe the world around us. Not to nerd-out too hard but language then is an exploration of the particular way in which the world is framed by the people who use it. It is a window into their reality.

Matt Samet’s Climbing Dictionary provides words, their etymology, a usage note and sometimes an illustration. And the entries are the right length to make this perfect sit-and-think fodder. The dictionary then, with its attempt to catalogue the vernacular of the vertical life, shines a light on our world. If you muse on its contents it provides a journey through that world’s history, its technology, its sociology and its psychology.

This review might be a tad grandiose, but that’s the linguist in me. Our words really are the connections between us. They are the stories that inspire us, the knowledge that empowers us and the lore that unites us.

Sure Samet’s tome might be a little Sepo-centric but there is enough meat in it that we Antipodeans can chew on to make it worthwhile.

1 0 6 BOOK REVIEW

— Simon Madden

The Caffeinator

THE SAMPLE LIFE COFFEE CONSULTANT Johan von Sha

Climbers dream of living in the Blue Mountains or the Grampians with easy access to the crags we love.

The reality, however, is most of us are urban creatures who spend equal time in climbing gyms and cafes as on cliffs.

From charging up on coffee in Blackheath, Horsham or Berry before hitting the crag to a pre-gym session caffeine hit, coffee is the unspoken hero in our lives. As the late, great Wolfgang Gullich once said, “You don’t climb then go for coffee, coffee is part of climbing.”

In coming editions we are going to breakdown all things coffee - crag, city and all in between - meanwhile, here is our first review of the best spots to get your fix:

SAMPLE COFFEE BAR Reuben Mardan, ex-Mecca Espresso, is an obsessed climber with more coffee than blood running through his veins.

He’s the mastermind behind Sample Coffee Bar, and, together with head barista Karl Tabet, he serves up some of the best coffee in Sydney right now.

The beauty of Sample Coffee Bar is, in addition to offering its own wonderful blend the ‘Pacemaker’, it allows customers to sample different blends and single estate/micro lot coffees from different roasters from around Australia.

Since opening they have featured beans from 7 Seeds, Mecca Espresso, Market Lane, Proud Mary, Supreme Coffee, Rueben Hills, Coffee Alchemy and Small Batch Roasters.

On any given day, you’ll have the option of trying the ‘Pacemaker’ or a guest blend, filter or cold drip brew. There’s also a selection of beans to buy for brewing at home or cliff.

It’s a small espresso bar with a handful of tables and chairs, but the Surry Hills’ people-watching is great. High quality sweet and savory baked goods are on offer, but the coffee is the true stand out.

And being masters of crag brewing, Reuben and Karl can advise on beans and brewing gear, be it for a pre-project-send boost or a campsite wake-up.

SAMPLE COFFEE ADDRESS 1A/118 Devonshire St, Surry Hills OPENING HOURS Mon to Fri – 7am to 4pm

IMPORTANT LOGISTICS 15MINS to SICG (St Peters) and ClimbFit (St Leonards).

30MINS to good bouldering in Sydney.

1.5HRS to the Blue Mountains

samplecoffee.com.au CAFE REVIEW 1 0 7

1 0 8 Brendan Helmrich on Hungry Eyes (23), Seaside Area.

Get to the Point We speak to Robert Dun, the editor of the new guidebook to Australia’s pre-eminent sea cliff, Point Perpendicular

Guidebooks usually require a substantial commitment of time and effort: what inspired you to take on the Point Perpendicular guide?

I have often found that guidebook authors have some kind of special connection with the areas they document - is Point Perp a place of significance to you?

I lived in Wollongong for many years so Point Perp was my local crag and I just loved the place. After I moved to Newcastle I missed climbing there regularly and would talk about it and the possibility of writing a guidebook a lot. In the end my wife told me that I either had to write the book or stop talking about it.

Plus, traditionally the Point Perp guide has been updated by whoever put up the majority of the new routes since the last guide and in this case it was Ivan ValentWe speak to Robert Dun, the editor of the new guidebook to Australia’s preeminent sea cliff, Point Perpendiculara and me. I am also a bit of a guidebook buff so when the opportunity came to make one it was difficult to resist.

Point Perp seems to polarise people, it’s either love it or hate it. I love it. I never get tired of going there. I love the smell of the ocean and the sound of the waves while I’m climbing. It isn’t just the climbing either, visiting Currarong is like going back in time, and camping at Honeymoon Bay in winter can be magic; quiet, secluded, empty.

Do you have a favourite route or area?

It depends a bit on my mood but I can always tell how well I am climbing by jumping on Bad Luck Streak (20) in the Lighthouse Area. I’ve done it lots of times but I never really know how I’m going to go on it. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not, but it’s always good. It’s also a crack and I have a bit of a soft spot for cracks.

You must have spent a lot of time out at Point Perp, do you have any favourite memories?

I always enjoy myself but I’m afraid there aren’t any stand out stories; although I do recall walking into the bombing range once and coming across a huge crater right in the middle of the road.

I remember wondering which was the more pointless activity, rock climbing or shooting at targets?

The biggest improvement I notice from the previous guide is the addition of aerial photo topos. It must have been tricky getting these shots. How did you do it?

Knowing where you are on the cliff top in relation to the climbs has always been a big problem at Point Perp. For this reason I wanted to use topo photos that showed both the cliff top and face in a single image. The only way to get these images was to take photos from the air. I chartered a small plane and shot out of an open window. I thought it would be fairly easy but I soon realised that small planes travel at 160 Kph and wobble a lot. I ended up

110

taking over 600 shots in less than 30 minutes and by the end of the session I had some serious forearm pump from trying to hold the lens still against the battering wind.

I noticed there is no history section, is there a particular reason you left it out?

Point Perp was developed by a reasonably small number of individuals and there’s a section at the start that has a blurb about each group and their respective climbing styles. There are also a few previously unseen photos of first ascents from the ‘80s. All the rest of is included in the first ascent details. I didn’t include a ‘stories’ section because I don’t really know many good ones and it’s easy to offend people, so I thought it best avoided.

Are there many more routes in this guide than the previous one?

There are over 70 new routes but overall there are 30 less routes than in the previous guide. This is because in 2003 the Department of Defence closed access to the bombing range so there are 100 routes that can’t be climbed anymore.

FAR LEFT Rick Phillips climbing Neptune (17), Lighthouse Area.

LEFT Ivan Valetta on Jaws (19), Seaside Area.

RIGHT Geoff Woods on Hello Dolly (18), Bayside Area.

Every guidebook author generally knows the potential of an area: does Point Perp still have a lot of scope for new routes?

There is still a huge amount of potential at all grades. All that is required is a little more work, walking or muscles. Take your pick.

There is a lot of choss though, so choose wisely!

Do cars still get broken into regularly at the Lighthouse?

I haven’t heard of any for years. As part of the range upgrade the Department of Defence installed a 24-hour manned security gate at the entrance to the range and they record the number plates of all vehicles that enter. These days it’s probably a lot easier to nick stuff from the car park at Nowra!

You mention that you are a bit of a guidebook buff, what are some of your favourite guides, and did you draw inspiration for your guide from them?

Writing the guide was a great excuse to buy a bunch of guides for the purpose of ‘study’. My favourite Australian guide has to be the Arapiles Selected guide. Every route description is just

so accurate. It’s as if the authors have climbed each route in the book ten times. It inspired me to get out and do some more route checking to make the Point Perp guide as accurate as possible.

My favourite foreign guide is probably the one for Indian Creek.

I just love the action photos, especially the nasty offwidths!

It is unusual for such a small number of people to have developed such a major area, do you think Point Perp attracts a singular type of developer?

I don’t think Point Perp attracts a certain type of personality.

I suspect it has more to do with Point Perp development requiring a bit more time and effort. It’s not that easy to wander along the base of the cliff looking for new lines. Development has tended to be done by locals who have had a bit more time to spend at the crag.

You can see a review of the Point Perpendicular guide on page 104.

You can can buy a copy of the guide at

www.pointperp.com 111

Athol Whimp back down on the glacier after making an alpine-style ascent of The North Face of Jannu (7710m), Nepalese Himalaya.

Andy Lindblade

112

Athol Whimp —19 6 1- 201 2—

He the one that grew from the land, Over and over again on the ramparts, Fissured, pushed against the sky and Held to the wind by his quiet valiance.

Who else wakes in wonder about Athol?

The one cast from sands and snows and truth, His heart, wrapped in bone and wrangled from His love of all that has gone under his traveled limbs, Holding, carving, and now collapsing back into The scrabbled rocks, sliding with the rivers Of grief he knows we hold.

Andy Lindblade

113

114