Jun
08
2008
| Mount Stupid |
|
|
|
| Sunday, 08 June 2008 | ||||
|
Our first training run for the Queens Birthday long weekend was a trek up Mount Barney via Logan's Ridge. Nicole, Brock and Shane where joined by Dennis who was dubbed expedition leader (as he had the directions, map & GPS) and temporarily insane ... so he fitted in quite nicely. The day began at stupid o'clock as we car pooled down to Mt Barney. We arrived in the car park just after 5am and set off shortly after. Shane broke out his shiny new trekking poles and quickly discovered that two trekking poles don't leave any hands free for holding a torch. In a stroke of genius (or possibly insanity), Shane attached the torch to his belt and the swinging produced some cool disco style lighting that was almost helpful in lighting the way. After leaving the car park we discovered that it is rather difficult to find an old forestry trail in the dark. Luckily it only took a small amount of bush bashing to find the trail. The bush bashing continued after the forestry trail ran out, but as the goal was to go up the ridge, the only real decisions required where which bit of scrub would be easier to push though. Eventually we found what appeared to be a real trail and happily followed that up the ridge. Soon we were faced with our first section of rock. Hiking poles were stowed and the scrambling began. We spotted some other crazy people high up on the rocks, so we figured that Dennis and is map hadn't led us too far astray. In true Team Insanity style we pushed on and caught the other group in quick time. However we didn't manage to "grind them into the ground" as Brock is so fond of saying. Instead we had a rest at the top of the ridge and they wandered off and were never seen again ... The remainder of the trek was somewhat indecisive. On numerous times we were confronted with a rock wall, decided there must be an easier way up, only to return later to the original rock face and make our way up. These short climbs ended up being a team effort with Shane and Dennis climbing up and lending a helping hand on a few occasions. The views from the tops of these small climbs were incredible ... although when mentioned, Nicole just replied with some mumbling and looked intently at the ground. The summit was reached around 1:30 and we stopped for lunch and had a chat with a local who was camping at the bottom of the mountain. He entertained us with stories of camping on the top of the mountain during storms and how the mountain top used to be covered in trees until a fire took them all out. During this time Nicole and Dennis attempted to get embarrassing photos of each other eating banana's (it's a long story). The original plan was to head down the south east ridge, but due the late arrival on the summit, and the fact that most of us had had enough "interesting" climbing coming up Logan's, we decided to head down peasants ridge. After a couple of unintentional detours we made our way to the Rum Jungle and started down the peasants ridge track. The trip down was uneventful. Shane broke out his hiking poles again and started to work out the best way to use them on a steep decent. By half way down he was singing the praises of the hiking poles and how good they were for the knees. The only real challenge was a small rock slab that had to be crossed, Nicole wasn't looking forward to this after her last trip to Barney, but crossed the slab easily after the climbing practice on the way up. Night fell shortly after we reached the flat section at the bottom of the mountain, so we walked the last hour back to the car by torch light. The final challenge is a small hill just before the car park. Both Shane and Nicole were talking this up as a painful little hill, but everyone got over the hill easily ... maybe all this training is paying off. So at the end of the day we'd walked for about 12.5 hours and had survived the mountain. The final impressions of the day were: Nicole: I'm never doing that again Shane: If we do that again we should probably take some rope Dennis: Eagles ridge next time ... you have to take abseiling gear for that one Brock: That was fun, lets go again
Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|