UNSW Bushwalking & Mountaineering Club

Newsletter - February 2000

Introduction

Welcome back for the year 2000. Hopefully you've had a good holiday, and are ready to get back into action at university (or should that be inaction). For those of you who are new to the club, whether this is your first year at university or not, whether you are an exchange student, a local student or another member of the university, welcome to the club. It is up to you to make the most of this club, we provide a great way for you to get together with other outdoorspeople and get out into the Australian bush, but ultimately you have to make the effort to sign up for trips and get out there. You've taken the first step, make sure you take the next.

This year we hope to bring you the usual wide selection of activities that we've been able to offer in the past. If you'd like to run a trip for the club, then please let us know. We can provide advice on how to organise a trip if you've never organised one before, and we can advertise your trip in the newsletter and on the website to help you get people along. The more people helping to organise club trips, the healthier the club becomes.

How the club works

Our club is basically a social club, whcih allows people with a similar interest in the outdoors to meet and organise trips together. Most of us aren't professionals, though a lot of us have many years of experience in leading trips, and so the trips are run on a competent amateur basis. Each trip is like a trip that you'd organise with your own friends, except that with hundreds club members, it is much easier to get people for your trips, and to meet other outdoors people.

Each month, on the second Tuesday of the month at 7:00pm in the Squarehouse we hold a club meeting. People show slides and photos of previous trips, we listen to guest speakers and announce upcoming trips. If you'd like to meet and get to know the people who are active in the club, come along to one of these meetings. Any trips that are announced at the meeting or have been notified to the newsletter editor (Daniel Marlay), are added to the trips list, and incorporated into the next newsletter. People who are interested in a trip can then contact the trip leader, and find out more about it.

In addition our club has a moderate selection of gear which is available for use on club trips and, depending upon availability, for hire for your own personal trips. We require a deposit on the gear that is refunded upon the safe return of the gear.

If you are interested in rockclimbing, we have regular training sessions at "The Ledge", a climbing gym in the Sydney University Womens Sports Union. Once you have acquired the basic rope skills involved in rockclimbing, you can attend these weekly training sessions for free (you will need to bring your own harness and shoes, or hire them).

Who's who

So who actually runs the club, and who do you contact if you need help with any aspect of the club. If possible contact us through e-mail, it is our preferred method of communication. If not, then don't ring before 8:00am in the morning or after 9:00pm at night, you may have strange waking hours, some of us don't.

Our Website - unswbmc.homepage.com

We are trying to move most of our club information and processes onto our website. This means that you should always be able to find up to date information about the club. unswbmc stands for UNSW Bushwalking and Mountaineering Club, thus the URL of the website. Some of the more important pages on the site are:

http://unswbmc.homepage.com/

The main page of the website.

http://unswbmc.homepage.com/admin/trips.html

The trips list - the most up to date listing of the club's activities.

http://unswbmc.homepage.com/admin/memberform.html

A printable copy of our membership form.

http://unswbmc.homepage.com/admin/maillist.html

Forms for joining the clubs general announcements and rock climbing discussion e-mail lists.

Also on the website we have sections for most of the activities that we do, with lists of what to bring on trips, who to contact for advice on different activities and photos. We also have other information pertaining to the administration of the club, and copies of past and current newsletters.

Bushwalking on the Main Range - 13/12/2000 - 14/12/2000

We headed off to the start of our walk in the snows on Sunday evening, why Sunday evening, well I had a bit of a dive course to do on the weekend, and I wasn't really free until Monday and Tuesday, so it was Sunday evening that we headed off. James Southwell provided us with much needed transportation, and also took the photos that you see accompanying this article. We did the usual run around, collecting people from various different parts of Sydney, before finally making it out onto the open road.

We stopped again at Canberra, to pick up my friend Chris, and stop for dinner. I had a stint at the driving, but James was back behind the wheel at Cooma, as my lack of sleep started to show. We finally ended up at Perisher Gap at about 2am in the morning. I always seem to end up arriving at the snowy mountains at some obscene hour of the night. Anyway, we parked the car and wearily dragged our packs just up the hill to a nice grassy spot under the trees, Seth, James and Laetitia opted to put up a tent or two, but Chris and I thought that the lovely night sky warranted sleeping out in the open.

The next day we woke to a beautiful clear blue sky, that is typical of the Snowy Mountains in summer, it was going to be a great day for walking, but we would need our sunscreen. After breakfast, we drove our car up to Charlotte Pass, where we parked and headed out along the Lakes Walk, fondly known as the Yellow Brick Road (it is paved for the first few kilometres). This descends to a crossing of the Snowy River, and then winds its way up to the pass above Blue Lake.

Blue Lake is a remnant of the times when the Main Range was glaciated, and is one of five glacial lakes in the Main Range area. It has a remarkably constant temperature, and is home to a species of shrimp which are found only in Blue Lake and Headley Tarn (the lake below Blue Lake). It is also one of the few places that you can go ice climbing in Australia.

We descended the track to the upstream end of the lake, and climbed up to the upper cirque via a steep gully. From there we cut back across the top and back to the main track. We had lunch a further up the hill, and a few of us tried some late season telemarking on the remains of a nearby snowdrift. Skiing is lots of fun, even on such a small patch of snow, and I did manage a rather impressive slide into creek below the snow drift, but that's another story.

After lunch, we dropped our packs at the top of the ridge, and headed out along the knife edge ridge towards the Sentinel. The Sentinel (seen in the photo on the left) is a small peak which sticks out from the western face of the main range. From the top, you can look all the way down to the Geehi valley, and across towards Mt Townsend, Lady Northcott's canyon, Watson's crags and the other impressive features of the Main range.

While on our way to the Sentinel, we discovered an impressive snow drift on which to practise our glissading technique. Glissading is like skiing on the soles of your shoes. With practise you can attain a reasonable degree of control, but even without practise, it is great fun.

From the Sentinel, we headed back to pick up our packs, and continued a short way along the Lakes walk before dropping down a ridge towards Club Lake. We found a great place to camp in one of the little valleys just downstream of Club lake.

Club lake is another one of the ex-glacial lakes in the snowy mountains. The little valley that we camped in, was part of the terminal moraine, that effectively dams the lake in. In the early days of Australian skiing, they used to run a speed skiing course down the side of the Club Lake cirque, out over the lake itself and onto the flat area below. Looking up at the slopes that evening, we wondered just which bit of the slope they ran down, and marvelled that people would attempt such feats on crudely crafted wooden skis, strapped tightly to their feet with leather straps.

We slept well that night, under the usual amazing snowy mountains sky. And we slept in well, with the sun well up before we started to move much. We preceded our walk this morning with a circumnavigation of Club Lake. We started off around the left-hand shore to the sound of frogs croaking away in the marshy shallows at the end of the lake. Around the head of the lake, we found more boggy ground, and a snake. It was only a little one, and the ranger that we spoke to later on in the trip guessed from our description that it was probably a copperhead. We also found another snow drift for glissading.

This drift was a lot longer and steeper than the one we had played on yesterday, and provided ample room for glissading. With a bit of effort you could manage two to three turns before you reached the bottom of the slope.

After our session on the snow, we continued to wend our way around the lake back to our campsite. We packed up our tents, and discovered that it was time for lunch already, oh well, nothing quite like a siesta in the sun. At length we had had enough of lazing around and having lunch, so we headed off down the valley, roughly following Club Lake creek, which eventually flows into the Snowy River.

Below the lake, the valley turns into a bit of a maze of glacial debris, the most striking feature of which is the proliferation of small depressions in the ground. The area around the creek is surrounded with small hillocks, each of which has a number of small crater like depressions in it. I think that this is a result of previous glacial action, but I'd have to aska geologist to be sure.

After a while, we crossed the creek again, and found an amazing little swimming hole. It is almost impossible to discern this swimming hole from a distance, as it is tucked away in between a series of boulders which the creek passes through. It has a fantastic little waterfall, and a lovely deep plunge pool, which is perfect for diving into from the surrounding rocks. After a little deliberation I decided that another break was in order, after all, it isn't a real snowies trip if you don't go swimming.

After a refreshing swim, and some jumping off the rocks, we headed on. As unfortunately happens, time was pressing on, and we needed to get back to the car. Just before reaching the base of the climb back up to Charlotte PAss, we reached the ruins of the old Kunama ski hut. Now all that remains of the hut is a chimney, but it is a reminder of the days when the main range was one of the popular skiing areas (well before skiing was particularily popular).

We quickly ascended the track back up to Charlotte Pass and the car. We met a ranger near the top, who was conducting a survey for the next round of park development. Well we were happy with the park as it was, but I suspect that the coming decades will see it getting more and more popularily used. Hopefully it will remain as unspoilt as it currently is.

Daniel Marlay

Attendees

• Daniel Marlay
• Laetitia Walther
• James Southwell
• Chris Ernst
• Seth Westra

Matt, Look out for the Pink Elephant

or

Report on the Australian Rogaining Championships 1999

"Friday Before" was taking on a familiar turn. Trips to the bakery and camping stores mixed with lashings of food, food and more food, plus litres of fluid to boot. I laid my camping clothes out on the bed. All of them to begin with. Goretex rain-jacket, spare goretex, mittens, hats, beannies, tights, thermals, jumpers etc, before the weather hypothesising begins. A look at the bureau of meteorology site on the net, talking to others about the weekend's weather, and then a complete disregard for all that information, as I put everything back into the cupboard except a couple of thermals and a light spray jacket. I get confident. "Heck, it's the Oz Champs - It won't be that cold - don't need a jumper or a rainjacket, we'll be moving so fast that I won't have time to think about being cold." Sure.

At about 18:00 on Friday afternoon, with bags packed, the bakery ran-sacked and the obligatory phone call to Mum to say again - "yes, that's right, 24 hours, I'll call you on Sunday night (I hope - gulp)" - a slick car pulls up outside my apartment. Looking fresh-faced and as hungry as a masochist, my specialist rogaining partner - fresh from a 4 hour plane-flight - opens the door. These days, Matt Chamberlain likes to spend his time hauling forty kilograms worth of cables and instruments for thirty kilometres a day through the desert looking for geological anomalies. He loves it, and there isn't much more perfect rogaining training. But just between you and me, it does sound a little bit over the top - he does it for 25 days straight at a time.

The Oz Champs happened to be in as neutral ground as physically possible, no home ground advantage to be had here. Like the titanic struggle that ensued in the search for a capital city, the mighty Murray River was again the demarcation of sorts. What better place to hold it, therefore, but in the Murray-Valley. That's just what they did. It just happens that it makes it an enormously long way to get there, no matter which side of the river you come from. We made it as far as about 45mins from the border by midnight, pulled into a roadside rest stop and rolled out the sleeping mat and bag. It was a perfect night, full moon, clear and crisp. The only alteration to the serenity was the Hume HWY. Ever slept next to it? Noisy. And kind of like a 4 richtor scale quake shuddering you in and out of sleep. Constantly.

We woke at about 07:00 with the sun completely up, making the rest stop sleep spot look even more dinky-die Aussie than under the half-light the night before, when it kind of looked half natural. Finished off the rest of the drive via Wodonga to nail a couple more coffee scrolls - adding to the 4 bowls of cereal, 12 pieces of bread, college dinner, desert, two apples, 1 large pizza, another couple of scrolls and about 4 litres of water that I put away on Friday. That was the order of the day, and it wasn't long before Matt and I had half a packet of breakfast ceral down and half a dozen donuts, sitting steamily on the top of the car at the event.

The actual site of the rogaine was itself a rest-stop called Shelley - about an hour East of Wodonga on the Murray Valley HWY. What became immediately apparent was that we were in the minority. That is, Matt and I weren't already there, pouring over maps, having had a perfect night's sleep in the Bedouin-like tent city that had sprung up at Shelley. Yes, it was a little intimidating. My only thoughts were of the "this is serious Mum" kind. It was big. Very big. The Australian Champs are always well attended they say but this one had about 450 people apparently, and they're not your usual punters. The race doesn't have a shorter version. 24hours or nothing. That kind of weeds-out about all the families, first-timers or average bushwalkers, but brings on the real nutters. Those people who were boiling up copious quantities of tuna pasta or protein drink supplements, whilst meticulously high-lighting and calculating their route using various point maximisation algorithms. Again - "this is serious Mum".

I guess it's the people eating raw eggs or the blokes wiping themselves down with some kind of oil - gaining huge pleasure from the experience - or the half man/half-women morphs that were seriously in need of female or male (or both) hormone, or the convicted stalkers, half-nuts and masochists from the papers that do it for me. This kind of Rogaining isn't about competitive bushwalking, nor is it about bringing together a 'broad spectrum of society', this was about the margins. A kind of Mardi Gras for the flipped-out.

Singleton/Sheppard/Baldwin, Hotchkiss (aka. the one who rotates his partners so they have time to recover from the emotional and physical stress he puts them through) etc. were the ones we recognised, and probably the ones we most feared out of all the other loonies.

Finally at about 11:50, we wandered down to the start, having had my last dump, last donut, worked out my clothes (two thermals and my $1 Spicer 70's wind jacket [it surely wouldn't rain?!]) and stuffed $15 worth of Baker's Delight Bread into my pack. Ready.

I Grabbed the control card and off we went. I always like the scramble people go through to get their cards, like the percentage error on the two or three seconds they gain there is going to make a difference after 24 hours?! Oh, well, see above, they're all wierdos.

We worked the North-West of the course first, taking advantage of the disused rail-road - once used for the Snowy Scheme that ran basically diagonally throughout the whole map. We put in some big turns taking out 24, 22, 14, 31, 23, 54 (stalked by weirdo #1), 10, 32, 39 (first trestle bridge on rail-road - bonus 50 points if we got all 5), 56, 66, 49 (trestle #2), 68, 87, 36, 44 (our first venture into the pine forests - where Matt would later talk of the Knights on horseback who defend the pine-forests at night with broad-swoards - that just about ruled out any more pine-forsests as far as I was concerned!) before making it out to the WP1 - the first water drop.

We arrived here in time to find Singleton/Sheppard/Baldwin just leaving, and then to have Nigel-someone arrive just before we left - we had put serious time into him during the past three controls (we were to find out later that he holds the Aust. record for 100km [8hours] and is the World mixed rogaining champion, hmm, one to watch).

Pushed through 64, 86 (near Mount Brutal!), 53, 75, 41, 92, 84, 73 at which point darkness started to fall, arriving at WP3 at 19:00 on full darkness. We were going like freight-trains. This was the fastest we'd ever moved, we were on 1080 points, averaging over 150 points an hour. Stoked. It was a perfect start. We'd hit everything we went for, and hadn't mucked around. It had taken its toll though. We basically hadn't stopped running for seven hours. Only taking the most steep hills at a walk, the rest at a kind of contorted jog or full blown 5min per km job on the roads. My ankle was holding well, and our conversations would reflect the good mood. Joking with the other teams there, all with that crazed look in their eyes. The hunt continued.

the real action now began. Rogaines are won and lost in the night. And this was the Oz champs. We kept saying to ourselves, 'Oz Champs' under our breathes and we would stumble into another bout of running. It was intoxicating. But that was during the light. Darkness doesn't just have a dampening effect on the temperature.

Now it was a pretty dense patch of points that we took methodically, running only where it was boring not to on the roads and spending seriously quality time with the maps. 20, 60, 90, 50, 80, 40, 51 (in very strange esoteric garden place - we were looking for drewards - Matt's suggestion again (thanks Matt) - what an imagination that boy has), 52, 72, 93 and 94. Between which, we had a pretty long road-bash. Both Matt and I confessed to seeing trees, and bushes infront of us at this point. I seemed to get them about head high, similar for Matt, and both of us could be seen swatting the things out of the way continually for the 2km we were on the road. Funny - now, not then.

At 94 we cracked out a few more of Matt's coffee-cookies that had proved the difference in the three-peaks traverse. Nothing like feeling totally wired at 02:00 on a Sunday morning in the middle of no-where running down red and white controls like they're strawberry fruitcakes. By now we were totally into it. Not talking about anything. Just in our own little bubbles. Fighting fatigue, soreness, mental challenges and the silhouettes we kept seeing jumping out from behind the trees. They're the worse. Think Sixth Sense.

From 94 it was onto 83, 71 and 67 for sunrise before running into the All Night Caf� operating at the South-Western extreme of the course. It was a tent with a fire in a 44-gallon drum surrounded by broken teams/dreams. Most were flat out or in the fetal position cowering away the images of the long night. It was a pretty sorry sight.

We collapsed onto the ground to suck back a hot drink or two. I pulled out my penne napolitana and could stomach about half of it before having to stop. I wanted the carbs but I was too fatigued to eat. Especially stone-cold garlic encrusted tomato juice and pasta tubes - you try it. Dumped the rest plus about $6 worth of Bakers Delight - if it wasn't eaten now it wasn't going to be. I kept only the sweetest stuff for the final efforts

As the night takes away, the day doth giveth and with the light now falling through the trees, we saw our first colours for about 12 hours. Nice.

Now fired up with another thousand points under our belts, we realised we were onto something here. It was time to get it moving again. Driving through 81, 70, 82 and onto 47 (tressle #3) we felt good, but knew what was to come. From here it was a run then walk, climbing 300 vertical metres up to a collection of three controls on the Eastern edge of the course with 190 points up for grabs in total. A must.

Getting up there was a little surreal. One foot infront of the other. I pinned my sight about 2m infront of my feet and didn't look up until it leveled out. By now, the energy stocks were falling. After getting 61 from a blackberry infested gully we topped out to find Singleton et al coming up behind us to go down into 61�could we be infront? It felt like it. Like the sniff of exhaust from the lead-car, there's nothing like a kick in the pants from the competition. We were off. So began the final stanza of the Oz Champs.

We ran at about 6 min/km pace pretty much for the next three hours, claiming 62, 74, 48 (trestle #4), 38 (trestle #5 ++++BONUS 50points), 42 (passed the girls we saw on Sat arvo who reckoned it looked like we could run for 24hours, didn't disappoint - we were running as we passed!). We were now in the final hour and so came big decision time. Whether to gun for a 60 pointer or to pick up a few 10s and 20s closer to the Hash House. 60 or bust was the call. Bust was the result. We crossed back over the Corryong HWY and I stopped to look down at the map. Then almost fell over. My left knee had collapsed. It refused to take any weight. I disregarded it as a good enduro athlete should and tried to keep running. I was kept to a bit of a hop but gradually forgot about it as thoughts of stopping properly and another 30 points filled my mind. When we did final hand the control card in - 23 hours, 40minutes later, I was in agony. It was seriously painful and no seating position would give me rest.

Basically, we were both wrecked. I didn't feel like eating though I knew I should've, I didn't want to stretch but every muscle in my body yearned for stretching, I was freezing and shivering but I couldn't be bothered to get a jumper out, I was thirsty, but didn't have a cup - which was enough to stop me (I couldn't work out how to drink anything without a cup, apparently). Interesting. All I did was curl up behind a tent from the wind and lie there listening to my breathing going steady in and out and my pulse putting in a good 70 or so a minute. High.

When finally it came to presentation time we were waiting with ready ears. We couldn't have gone harder. But we didn't know the competition and we didn't have any real feed-back on our position. They read the overall back from 10th and by the time 3rd came and we hadn't been mentioned, we'd either had a shocker or nailed this thing good and proper. Like the swimming carnival in Primary School, the suspense was to build for everyone who hadn't been mentioned but meant pretty much nothing for those who had. As names of enduro champions fell around us, Hotchkiss, Nigel-bloke, Jacoby, Cotter, even that Wild-trek legend who wins every time; I began to realise we'd had a good day.

2nd overall was the call, on 2670 points. We were infront of 3rd by about 80, but behind 1st by about 200. That's heaps. We'd been worked over by Singleton's men. Unfortunate. But to the winner the spoils. Well done to them, they showed they were in another class that day.

Anyway. We cracked a place at the nationals, in a tough field, beating people who wouldn't have considered us rivals before, not knowing our names probably. It felt very good (you just had to convince yourself that it was actually all worth it!).

Final thoughts. One can always go harder. Thanks to Matt, it was great. See you in NZ.

Simon Angus

A taste for Scottish hills and Haggis

As we all know you can't go past the Australian bush as a place for outdoor jaunts, but having been on exchange in Scotland for the last four months I thought it a good idea to write about how the walking has been in the land of haggis and whiskey. I have tried haggis and quite liked it.

Upon arriving in September (autumn) I was quickly whisked off on a geology field trip before I could even think about jet lag. It was to the far north west of Scotland, just south of Lochinver. The landscape is almost entirely shaped by glaciers; it will be many years before water makes much of a mark. The creeks, or burns as they are called here, run straight down the sides of the huge U shaped valleys, they haven't carved out a gully for themselves yet just a small notch. This creates some wonderful cascades and waterfalls. Trees can only be found in small pockets with most hillsides covered in heather and sphagnum moss. It is very wet and boggy to walk through and it is extremely hard to judge the scale of the hill you are walking up unless you see a deer or something to make a size comparison. The hill is usually bigger than you thought and towards the top it gets knobbly and rounded and you come across false summit after false summit and if you are lucky enough not to have a white out on top there will be the most wonderful view.

After almost 2 weeks of diligent mapping of the rocks in the area we had a day designated to leisure. Many of us decided to go 'hillwalking'. A large group headed off to bag Quinag, which is a spectacular ridge of 5 peaks around 800m high. One patriotic Scot in that group was wearing his kilt. 2 Scottish lads and I decided to do a Munro. A Munro is a hill in Scotland that is over 900m high, there are over 280 of them and commonly keen hillwalkers here are aiming to bag them all. Some old hillwalkers have done them all more than once. Speaking of measurable walking feats where perhaps the beauty of the place comes second to the desire of conquering things, they have a 3 peaks challenge here too. It involves summiting the highest peak in each country on mainland UK, that being, England Scotland and Wales. The highest peak in Wales is Snowdonia, in England it is Scaffell Pike in the Lakes District and in Scotland it is Ben Nevis, which is the highest peak in the UK at a pathetic 1344m. The latitude of Ben Nevis is what makes it challenging though; at about 55N it gets pretty bad weather and plenty of snow and ice. Many people have died on it whether it is ice climbers in an avalanche or unprepared tourists in a white out. You have to do the peaks in the quickest time possible, which involves quite a lot of driving between them. This is a bit of a cop out when you think that for the Australian version you walk about 80km and do an extra 1000m climb or so to get back to Katoomba.

The Munro we climbed is called Ben More Assynt, Ben means mountain in gaelic, and Assynt is the nearby Loch, which was our starting point. Loch Assynt is at about sealevel and not far from the ocean, from there we headed up the glen, with many rabbits fleeing from the path ahead and feet sinking into a muddy mire at times. The climb up was steady, and as we approached the ridge the rock type went from limestone to quartzite. Nothing much grows on the quartzite so from there until the summit we were walking on quartzite rubble, which sounded like broken porcelain under you're feet.

Once on the ridge it was a nice walk around to the first summit, Conival, a little lower then Ben More but still over 900m so I guess you could say we did 2 Munros. Between Conival and Ben More there is a very narrow quartzite ridge, as we walked along it a RAF Tornado jet flew over the ridge we had just walked along to get to Conival which was exciting. The jets had been flying low over the Loch while we were busy mapping, the pilots looked to be having fun.

On most hill summits in Scotland there is a pile of rocks, or cairn. Apparently you are suppose to pick up a rock at the bottom and put it at the top. We sat, out of the howling cold wind below the cairn and had lunch. The clouds cleared from the summit every so often and we got a fantastic view over the surrounding mountains and to the Outer Hebrides Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. We could also see Quinag, which was low enough not to be in cloud. All in all an enjoyable walk.

Emma Murray

The Trips List

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