UNSW Bushwalking & Mountaineering Club

Newsletter - February 2001

Introduction

Welcome back for the year 2001. 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, which 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 Roundhouse 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, are added to the trips list, which is incorporated into the next newsletter and posted on our webpage. 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 huge 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 rock climbing, we have regular training sessions every friday evening during session from 5pm. These are held 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). This year, there is also a Beginners' Climbing Training Course, so even if you know nothing about climbing but are interested to learn, be sure to sign up.

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 - http://go.to/unswbmc

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.

http://go.to/unswbmc

The main page of the website.

Once you're there, the more important pages on the site are:

/admin/trips.html

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

/admin/memberform.html

A printable copy of our membership form.

/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.

The Fear (November 2000)

Keo rang me two days before I my first exam this session with an offer I just couldn't refuse. Study comes second, in a big and definite way to this kind of opportunity. The Fear. The guidebook says a 47m 17, but no one who's climbed it is going to tell you that.

Anyway, Keo called me and said that we were meeting at 7am out in the parking lot at the top of the head. For me, what was worse than missing valuable study time for my exams was having to wake up a good six hours earlier than my Stuvac midday rising time. It had to be done though, and like many of my early morning rises, the knowledge that I'll soon be climbing is one of the things that pops me out of bed awake and eager . . .

Ben came round at about 6:45am (ouch) and we drove out to the head. The first thing that starts alarm bells ringing in the sane part of your brain (the thing you turn off when climbing sea cliffs) is the descent route. Scott told us that the last time he'd climbed at North Head, he'd abseiled it instead of walking it, but since Keo had already started down, Ben and I had no choice but to follow.

The highlights of the descent are first the section where there's at most six inches of ledge that your walking on and you just have to hang on to a chain and believe very strongly that you aren't going to slip. Keo's wonderful advice: "Don't look down." Lower down, but still a good fifteen metres above the waves crashing into rocks below, there's a wonderful step across in a little corner. Basically it's two ledges that taper to a point where they very nearly meet. Shutting your eyes and stepping across is not an option as both sides are about an inch deep in little flakes of shale(?) just waiting to slip out from under you.

What's that you say? No, I'm not even up to the climb yet. Maybe they should call the whole area "The Fear". If someone had been with us, who'd climbed there before, they could have told us, "You ain't seen nothing yet . . ." but i'm amazingly glad they weren't.

The start of The Fear is quite reassuring. There are three of the bolts from The Bolt Ladder within plain sight, all sitting on a 2m long slab of rock. Sigh of relief, it's all nicely protected. A first mistake would be to think this was a sport climb. A second mistake would be to use the majority of the bolts which have been sitting in the wonderful sea spray for many years.

The climbing on the first pitch was interesting, and not amazingly scary. A little bit of thin work on slimy slopey holds was fun, but, apart from having one of my handholds break off I didn't feel like there were any major issues. Keo's rating of his own climb of the first pitch were: "I didn't climb that, I scrambled." but then, who's never done a knee/beached whale mantle before anyway?

The view from the belay ledge was amazing. Even though we were there on an overcast foggy morning, with the threat of rain looming, looking out from a little cave roost to see South Head and the city in the distance is one of those sights you will always hold dear. That is also because, up until this point, you were just rock climbing. The white knuckle battle with fear of dying horribly and becoming a bug splat on the rocks below is just about to begin.

Ben showed he had the goods yet again, leading both pitches without so much as a stumble, but the "Take in I'm going to have a rest now" that the wind took out over the sea instead of to Keo at the belay ledge, couldn't have helped matters. Still, leading a sea cliff on an empty tank is a character developing experience.

After Keo's mishap of dropping one of Ben's, ahem, the Club's nuts from the first pitch he wasn't as keen on cleaning the second, so he volunteered to go first. Or was that the reason? After telling me first that the reason Anthea hadn't come along was that she'd done it before and simply didn't want to have to do it again, Keo went on to say things like, "Man, I just have to get off this cliff." A ha . . . ha ha . . . yes, nervous laughter all round.

"Don't worry man, it's a top belay . . . I'll climb anything if it's top roped!" Sound like wise words don't they? Well, when I said them, I was safely clipped to a bolt and not hanging my arse over a forty metre drop to rocks and waves.

First Attempt: Keo stepped back, grabbed the handholds and proceeded to hoist himself up over the brink, but made a mistake with his footing and fell. Ok, that's alright, I dragged him back the the rope he was towing up for me to follow on, when I looked a little closer at his belay rope. Some of the sheath was rather badly frayed, but my esteemed opinion thought that it'd be fine to climb on for now. Note to all readers: My esteemed opinion is bullshit. I've since had to cut three metres off that rope, because it was frayed all the way down to the core.

Second attempt saw Keo yet again pop off, and this time, I think, it was enough. We rigged a rope for abseil and he met us back at the carpark later. Well, he did get a chance to pick up Ben's nut and chalkball (bad bad day to drop that, my friend) and try that wonderful descent in reverse. I was about to say I didn't envy him, but then I looked up at the next pitch . . .

"Holy Shit."

It was at this point I realised that I had just thrown down the abseil rope, my only retreat, and I'd left myself with extremely little choice in this particular matter. Let me set the scene . . . You are on a belay ledge, then you walk backwards until your heels are kind of hanging out over space (if you look down, you can see white foam crashing between your feet. Not recommended) and you have two small kind of slopey crimpers for your hands. You can see the next hold, a wonderfully inviting big ledge thing that you know you'll have no trouble holding once you get there.

The guidebook says there is a 19 move to leave the second belay ledge, and it makes me wonder why the climb is not graded 19 if there is a 19 move in it, but well, maybe Mike Law's just being an arsehole. He did, however, name the climb perfectly.

After my third aborted attempt at this move, I pulled back into the belay ledge and sat down for a second to calm myself down. Looking out over the water I decided that the move was only a moderately difficult boulder move that I could do first go if I was a metre off the ground. The thing that was eating at me and melting away all semblance of courage was the fact that I was slightly higher than a metre off what is not generally termed as "ground" (more often, the word "sea" is used). I did at this point entertain the thought that I had two slings over my shoulder and that they can, in times of emergency, be used as prussiks.

Eventually, however, I psyched myself up and just cranked. I was remembering how annoyed at myself I'd been when I backed off a much shorter and less daunting climb in The Grampians and was determined not to do that again. So I pulled up, got a half decent foothold, and made the handhold. After the next move I took a rest on the ledge above to find that I was completely exhausted and my knees were still shaking. Anthea sent a message to Ben on his phone while we were driving back later saying: "Did The Fear live up to its name?" Well Anthea, the answer is a resounding yes.

The rest of the second pitch was classic. Well worth the three star rating, the juggy roofed traverse being my personal highlight. Especially with that wonderful effect of fear fading slowly and draining all of your strength with it, the rest of the pitch was at some places a hefty task, but overall, great climbing.

At the top, even after having rested on the rope to get there, I was completely exhausted. I curled up in a foetal position at the belay and just tried to convince myself that everything was going to be okay and I wasn't going to die anymore. Relief at being again on horizontal ground is a wonderful, amazing, life restoring thing.

On the way out, we stopped at Shakespeare's pies in Manly (I recommend the Tandoori Chicken, personally) and watched the people walk past. I couldn't help thinking this way, but as I looked in many of their eyes I said silently to them, "You don't know what it's like to be alive. You ordinary people don't understand what it's like out there, in the real world."

In hindsight, I should point out that climbing at North Head is banned since it is in the Sydney Harbour National Park, and all events told in this story are completely fictional (HAHAHAHAHA).

by Marc Chee, December 2000

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