A Step Along The Ladder

In Episode 67 of The Sharp End podcast, while relating a scrambling accident that happened on Ellingwood Ridge on La Plata in Colorado, Tori, the protagonist or, depending on how you look at it, the victim, describes how she is "comfortable being uncomfortable." Apparently this is because Tori climbs in an indoor gym all the time. I see your eyes rolling and that is probably fair. There is little correlation between indoor rock climbing and scrambling a long, exposed and shockingly loose 4th to 5th class ridge on a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado and anyone who thinks they have become "comfortable being uncomfortable" is actually, as we all were at that age, simply blissfully unaware that we are - to quote Accidents in North American Mountaineering - "exceeding abilities."

Now that I am almost 60, I have to push myself hard to get into a situation where I might be "exceeding abilities." I know my abilities fairly well, although admittedly, I surprise myself sometimes by succeeding where I expected to fail. But knowing my abilities well, I seemingly can have all the will in the world to go out and do something challenging and yet achieve whatever the "thing" was without too much drama. Sure, I might be tired and uncomfortable and happy to have the "thing" (whatever it is) over, but generally I no longer reach out and touch the edge the way Tori did on Ellingwood Ridge.

In my youth, I fell over the edge - literally - many, many times. I fell down cliffs and knocked myself senseless, I staggered back from trips in the early hours of the morning by the faint light of a fading headlamp somehow expected to show up for work in two hours, I lost food on ski traverses and skied for days with nothing to eat, I endured mountaineering trips with all my gear including my sleeping bag soaked for half a week, on ski mountaineering trips my feet swelled to twice their size and had to be painfully stuffed into frozen ski boots every morning, I got hit by falling rocks, and caught in avalanches, I spilled out of whitewater boats in rapids and lost all my gear, almost drowned and had to bushwack out to the road carrying a whitewater boat with no paddle, I limped off rock climbs with sprained ankles, sustained countless scratches, cuts and bruises, dodged falling rocks on alpine climbs, shivered at belays, and disturbingly watched my gear rattle out of cracks leaving long unprotected sections of climbing. Twice, my climbing rope got caught in cracks and I had to untie and finish the route and once I was so scared leading a rock route (!) I almost blacked out.

Many, but not all of these mishaps occurred during the glory days of my youth when my adventure eyes were way larger than my adventure belly and I had the blithe over-confidence and hubris of youth that comes not from an honest estimation of difficulty and ability but just blind ignorance. If you survive that stage, eventually you learn to match your ability fairly closely to your challenge and you start having real fun, the kind of fun that challenges you just enough to push your boundaries out a little without scaring you spitless or shitless.

But, back to Tori and "getting comfortable being uncomfortable." Obviously, this is nonsense, one cannot be both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time; a situation analogous to being both dead and alive at once. Even the Queen who easily could believe "six impossible things before breakfast" would not swallow that one.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about getting uncomfortable. Outdoor sports like ocean kayaking, rock and alpine climbing, ski mountaineering, whitewater paddling, backcountry skiing - the so called "adrenaline" sports - have drawn me since I was in my early twenties. The appeal is complex and involves a desire to explore both myself and the natural world as well as the need to get tired, scared, challenged, worked, and yes, uncomfortable.

I have wondered, however, if we are ever really are as uncomfortable as we think we are. Perhaps we have some kind of built in central governor mechanism that limits our choices so that when we head out to do something that scares or challenges us we unconsciously narrow down our adventure to match our ability. When young, we easily push out well beyond the boundaries of our expertise not because we are better at getting uncomfortable but simply through ignorance. As we gain experience, our ability to accurately gauge the balance between challenge and expertise improves and we settle onto a line that is close enough to, but not quite over the edge beyond which we would fail.

Sometime early in 2021, I don't remember the date but I do remember the place, Doug said that I was getting "fearful" as I got older. We had paddled out to North Head in an off-shore wind and had landed just inside North Head to consider our options. The wind was so strong that when we got out of our boats, the wind picked our boats up and it was only by quickly grabbing them that the boats were not tumbled and smashed on the rocks. I wanted to head back, Doug wanted to keep going. The problem with an off-shore wind is, of course, that it blows you off-shore, next stop New Zealand. We ended up paddling back. It was work, but not desperate, and I made the return journey with much less trouble than I had anticipated and I got to thinking that maybe Doug was right, I was getting fearful as I aged.

I like to think that since then I have regrown the ability to push against the boundaries again because I do not want to be a fearful person. Moving towards and beyond the edge of failure can be giddily intoxicating. Being scared to try and fail, yet trying and failing anyway, is perhaps one of the greatest gifts that adventure can impart. We learn that failure, rather than being a hard endpoint is actually a step along a ladder.

Programming For Kayaking And Climbing

 A good thing to remember when planning: if you get tired reading it, imagine what you are going to feel like doing it. Charlie Francis.

This could be the precis of my training log which I typically lay out a week in advance. It would be interesting to keep a paper log, because there would be a certain number of corrections that might be instructive in hindsight. As it is, my training log is a computer spreadsheet and if I switch around a paddle day with a climbing day or move a strength training day because I am not recovered that detail is overwritten and lost to analysis.

PC: N. Blacklock

I am back into training for kayaking while still training for climbing, which makes programming an exercise in creativity and frustration. As an older athlete, the dream of doubling up - two legitimate training sessions on one day - is just that, a dream. Recovery, particularly after hard efforts just takes so damn long, and trying to squeeze one more hard training or performance session in per week is so often counter-productive. Everything goes backwards and super-compensation rapidly becomes de-compensation. Ego checking at the door is mandatory.

Performance days sometimes yield surprising and unexpected results, like when you send a climb with no expectation of doing so or post a much faster than normal time on a regular aerobic training run. Our recent trip up Mount Donovan in Deua National Park involved 2200 metres of elevation gain in 1.5 days and most of that was bushwacking through rough and steep terrain carrying heavy packs. I felt pretty good the day after and finished the week up with a long climbing day, two paddle days - one all out sprinting - and a strength training session.

But then again, that could be why I am feeling a bit smashed this week and struggling to get through park bench workouts and modest climbing days. One thing about getting older, besides its inevitability, is recovery cannot be rushed, something that in the heady days of youth, climbing and skiing seven days a week, month after month, was simply unimaginable.

Getting Uncomfortable: Mount Donovan, Deau National Park

It is not exactly clear to me why I wanted to walk up Mount Donovan in Deua National Park. At just over 900 metres, it is not the highest peak in the park, fire roads go to higher mountains; but it is difficult to reach, particularly if you come from the east, and marks the northern extent of the Donovan fault line, a plug of old volcanic rock which has eroded into relatively sharp ridge-lines and deep cut gorges.

Away from the ubiquitous fire trails, most of Deua National Park is infrequently visited. The valleys are deep and steep sided, any trip off fire trails requires committed bushwacking, the ridge lines are waterless, while the creeks and rivers can be choked with vegetation that makes travel slow and difficult. Since the 2019/2020 fires, even the old bridle trails have disappeared under thick regrowth. Of course, in some weird way, all of that adds to the appeal as I am one of those increasingly rare people who simply enjoys the challenge. The problem with a comfortable life is that it becomes harder and harder to face physical and mental challenges. Eventually, we lose the will altogether.

Approaching from the east, there are three different, almost equally long, ridgelines that provide access to Mount Donovan; all originate at Oulla Creek so the first thing a walker has to do is access Oulla Creek. Fire trails run along the long north south running ridgeline to the east and provide a bushwack free approach to within a kilometre or so of Oulla Creek.

Leaving around noon, we had a couple of hours fire trail walking before dropping steeply into Oulla Creek where we found a wonderful camp-site in preserved rain-forest beside pools and small falls on Oulla Creek. After the obligatory mug of tea, I scrambled above Oulla Creek and down an old blind channel to rejoin Oulla Creek and the base of the ridge we would walk up next day. A mini reconnoitre to confirm our plan was not completely crazy.

I got up at first light the next morning and put the stove on for coffee. Doug followed shortly after and we had coffee and a quick breakfast and were away from camp at 7.15 am. We quickly crossed the ridge and descended back down to Oulla Creek and jumped across to the other side at a narrow gravel bar and started walking up.

We had a 400 metre climb up a spur ridge to join a prominent and narrow in parts ridge that runs along the south side of a deeply incised gully. The bush-wacking varied from quite easy to moderately difficult in sections where the ground was steep and loose, and the regrowth tangled in with burnt and fallen trees. At around 480 metres ASL (above sea level) we clambered up onto a narrow ridge of broken rock quite characteristic of the Donovan fault line. To the north was a deep rugged gully lined with bits of cliffs, also remnants of the Donovan fault line. To the east, we had views over the lowlands to the coast, while south lies the larger bulk of Deua National Park.

The next 1.5 kilometres of ridge was slow going although we gained very little elevation. Scrambling along the spine of the ridge was fun and almost reminiscent of mountaineering trips in Canada, except that there were twisted and twined trees and shrubs to push through. The views were spectacular, except that the top of Mount Donovan still appeared a disconcerting distance away.

After about two hours uphill, we scrambled off the narrow ridge and down to a saddle where we had a further 400 metres of uphill bushwacking to reach the top. There was definitely some very thick and slow travel through this section as last summers overgrowth of annuals had died back and lay thickly over the top of ankle twisting talus. Each step required a large high step to push down the dead vegetation matter and often it felt like we barely touched actual ground walking instead on matted dead vegetation. Finally, however, we intersected a north south running ridge and walked up open ground under large eucalypts to the trig at 906 metres. All around the ground falls away steeply and the top feels like an airy place to visit. A short distance down from the top we scrambled onto a big boulder with a view to the northwest for our first break of the day.

It was, however, a necessarily short break as we still had a long way to travel. As one always does after a long ascent, we looked for a "short cut" back to Oulla Creek, but, as is so often the case in the wilderness and life, there was no short cut, so getting back to camp involved retracing the route. Surprisingly, we did manage to shave about 40 minutes off our ascent time; often when bushwacking going down can be as slow as walking up. At 2:30 pm, we crossed Oulla Creek to our campsite, blackened by charcoal, scratched and torn, but pretty happy. I plunged into the chill Oulla Creek to wash off six hours of sweat and grime before pulling camp down while Doug brewed up a much deserved cup of tea.

We had a full hour at camp, although with taking down camp and packing backpacks, the actual rest time was considerably less. The least appealing part of the return trip was a 300 metre bushwack up through thick and tangled vegetation to regain the fire road. Doug thought this would take 1.5 hours given we were now hefting heavier packs and were somewhat fatigued already, plus, this last section of bush-wacking was some of the most tangled and tedious we did over the entire trip. However, one hour after leaving camp I regained the fire trail at exactly the spot we had left it a day and a half ago, despite having sweated profusely on the way up as the weather changed and the humidity increased. A couple of hours fire trail walking, one more river ford, and we were back at the car, tired, grubby, happy.

Barely Better Than Nothing

Diabetes Australia just published their position statement on type 2 diabetes remission. Recognising that a lifestyle disease can be improved or even reversed with lifestyle interventions seems self-evident but has, in fact, been anything but blindingly obvious except to a few fringe dwelling lunatics who believe mainstream medical advice to eat a "healthy diet high in wholemeal grains" and "all foods can fit" is complete tripe.

If you take the time to read through the position statement you will conclude, at least fringe dwelling lunatics will conclude, that the position statement is better than nothing, but not by much. Firstly, this phrase "Healthy eating (with attention to portion size and kilojoule intake)" sounds suspiciously like "eat less, move more" to lose weight. While that strategy may involve weight loss, how does one actually eat less and move more? If the equation were so simple we would not have a diabesity problem that is currently far worse than any infectious pandemic.

But, back to "healthy eating." What is healthy eating? Who knows, there is glaringly no definition. Similarly, "portion control and kilojoule intake" is a failed strategy. We now have literally decades of advice from conventional medical practitioners to pay "attention to portion size and kilojoule intake" and the result is a population that is sicker, fatter and weaker at every age group. There is a point at which even the "experts" have to come around to the idea that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."

What is surprising - or maybe it isn't - about this position statement is that the real drivers of type 2 diabetes remain completely ignored. Sure there is the standard "genetics, age, lifestyle factors including food intake and physical activity, weight, use of some medicines, and other medical conditions" (which came first the insulin resistance and diabetes or the other medical conditions?) to explain type 2 diabetes but none of these explain the rapid and disastrous increase of type 2 diabetes over the last several decades. Our genetics have not changed, our physical and social environment has.

Here is a short list of the things that really lead to type 2 diabetes:

• An over abundance of cheap, readily available addictive processed and highly processed food.

• "All foods can fit," aka "moderation", "portion control" and other such platitudes.

• Protein dilution in the modern diet.

• Poor dietary guidelines which, if followed, minimise protein intake.

• Ignoring the protein leverage hypothesis and maximum foraging strategy as evolutionary drivers of food intake.

• A societal trend towards rewarding every event with food.

• Eating as recreation.

• An environment which favours little movement and maximal calorie intake.

• The addition of industrial seed oils and sugar (in various forms) into every packaged food in the supermarkets and all cafe, restaurant, and take out meals.

• Lack of social support for people who want to eat a real food diet.

Overall, the tone of the position statement is negative and realistically, I think, represents the reality of achieving diabetes remission in our current environment. Giving up processed and ultra-processed food is, in fact, very hard and goes against both evolutionary drivers that control our behaviour and social norms. I know this personally, yet I consider myself lucky to have a partner who is both supportive and who shares my lunatic, fringe dwelling beliefs. People with less conviction, less grit, less social support, even less understanding of how our brains actually work, are literally standing against Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Medicine like David battling Goliath.

There are three words missing from this position statement that doom it to failure by the time the sun sets this evening and those are "whole food diet."

Reconnaissance

I'm not a big one for reconnaissance trips. Frankly, they mostly feel like a waste of time to me. In the modern world, most issues can be resolved with mapping, satellite imagery, weather forecasts, light-weight gear, etc. But, as I get older and find myself recreating in areas with significant - and by significant I mean virtually overwhelming - bush regrowth, my failures are becoming more common but no less annoying.

So, to avoid another journey to nowhere, I went on a "reccy." There were three bits of issues I was hoping to resolve. One was access and parking, both of which checked out. Two was crossing a river, no problem at mid calf to mid thigh, and three was bush. The bush is the game changer or I should say game stopper. Since the big fires of 2019/2020, bush regrowth is insanely thick verging on impenetrable. Most folks I talk to have not had the real regrowth experience - acacia, wattle and eucalpytus growing at a density of one to two plants per square centimetre. Woven through the regrowth are tenacious vines that are literally impossible to push through. Spectra is weaker than these vines.

Without repeat experience, most people just don't seem to be able to imagine how thick the regrowth is. One trip/experience is not enough and can be written off as variation. It seems to take multiple trips to really grasp the lesson. This is as true for me as it is for anyone else, hence the reconnaissance. Anyway, the bush seemed manageable, at least what I could discern without doing the whole trip which definitely does not fit into the reconnoitre template and for which, with only one hard-boiled egg and 750 ml of water, I was not equipped to do.

ABC

Ironically, in light of my last post on the risk matrix, I came close to abseiling off the end of my climbing rope yesterday. Just as my feet touched down, I noticed that my brake hand was very near the end of one strand of rope. Once I unweighted the rope, the short strand hung about a metre off the ground. With my weight on the rope and a good amount of rope stretch (dynamic ropes stretch about 18%), I still had a metre of rope in my hand when I reached the ground, but that is skating a little too close to the edge for me.

A risk matrix would not have prevented this near serious accident, but a mental check-list would. However, mental check-lists only work if you actually run through the mental check-list in your mind before you cast off from the anchor. A simple mental checklist for abseiling is A, B, C. Is the Anchor bomber? Is your Belay device correctly threaded and attached to the belay loop? Finally, is your Carabiner aligned along the spine with the gate closed and locked?

I checked all these things, and, as I always do, I weighted the abseil before removing my PAS from the anchor, and checked everything again with weight on the rope. At a sport climbing crag in Canada, I once narrowly caught a beginner climber about to abseil off a climb with only one strand of rope threaded through the belay device. That would have been a quick trip to the bottom of the crag.

Setting up the abseil, I thought I had pulled through plenty of rope to have a good amount from both ends on the ground but I could not see the base of the crag from where I stood on the ledge (it's a steep wall). One strand of rope was still clipped through a draw on the crag which distorted my view of how much rope I had pulled up and lowered. I thought about putting a simple prussic or safety on the rope as a back-up, but I usually don't do that for straight forward one pitch abseils when it is just as easy to simply wrap the rope around your leg if you need to be hands free. A prussic would help a bit, but it is still possible to abseil off the end of the rope with a prussic safety on.

Of course, tying a knot in both ends, or even knotting both ends of the rope together would have been a good idea and would prevent me abseiling off the end of the rope although I would need some way to climb back up the ropes to equalise them (I had a sling and prussic cord on me so I could have rigged something to achieve that) if I found one end did not reach the ground.

Classically, it was the end of what was starting to feel like a long, tiring and hot day on a wall that was a wee bit toasty in the sun and I was thirsty, weary, half dreading the steep walk out, and thinking about all the gear that had to be retrieved. All the hallmarks of an accident waiting to happen.

Assessing Risk

I finally finished the 367 documents that make up the NSW SKC Sea Skills assignment. At this point, I can't say I have learnt much of anything new but I am not a beginner to sea kayaking or adventure sports in general. Perhaps if I was a novice my "learnings" - a word I hate because it is not really a word but I put it in here to show that, like the youth, I too can misuse the English language - would be much more spectacular.

After 40 years of adventuring outdoors, however, I can, to use another hackneyed expression, claim that this is not my first rodeo. The trip plan part of the assignment was not too bad. I've done dozens of these before and they can be handy devices mostly on complex trips where navigation can be tricky or terrain may require alternative routes. The basic idea is to break a longer trip down into "legs," assign start and end times, note grid references or navigation parameters (handrails, backstops, checkpoints), stick the whole thing into a spreadsheet and the end result is an instant trip plan that will impress your companions when distributed ahead of time.

One of the documents that must be produced is this matrix which I have to say is the silliest piece of policy wonk work that I have ever encountered. There is just so much wrong with this idea that it is hard to even know where to start. The idea is that before the trip you all sit around and brainstorm (literally how you are instructed to fill in this document) all the things that could possibly go wrong, from untended hang-nails discovered when a paddler puts their booties on to an attack by a Great White Shark (true story). As you can imagine, that list is, depending on your level of experience (people actually have a hard time imagining something they have never encountered) and imagination pretty much infinite.

Once the risks are recorded, they are categorised according to likelihood, on a five point scale. How you determine what is "moderately" likely is beyond me and I suspect if you asked 10 different people to categorise a single risk based on likelihood you would get 10 different answers, never mind the fact that there are supposed to be only five options.

Next up for each risk rate consequence, again on a five point scale, and again, something that 10 different people would rate 10 different ways, and which undoubtedly has a large individual component. A strained muscle on a 28 year old is a much less consequential event than a strained muscle on a 78 year old, and any trip might include both ends of the spectrum. How then does one rate consequence? Perhaps add another layer to this already opaque document and rate consequence by participant?

At this point, blood is poring out of your eyes but you must persevere because the matrix is not even half way done. Each risk has to have the component inputs stratified by person, equipment, environment. Why those three? Who knows? Standard outdoor adventure risk protocols routinely use the concepts of "objective"versus "subjective" hazards, concepts that most people can intuitively understand as being out of our control (although some argue this is not the case) versus within our control. This most sensible criterion facilitates thinking about how risks might be mitigated which is, after all, what planning is all about. PA matrix seems to be more about obfuscation than clarification, however.

Next, the risk level is read off a matrix which plots the likelihood of an event against the consequence of an event and results in one of four possible risk levels: high, significant, moderate or low. This is absurd and dignifies a completely subjective assessment with a seemingly objective measure. And, even if this matrix did in some way approximate reality, a concept as hard to grasp as liquid mercury because everyone's perception of risk varies, what is a paddler to do with a risk level of high or significant? Should the trip be cancelled?

One of the most fascinating and disturbing consequences of modern life is that, in the moment, we live almost risk free. This is not strictly true as there are definite risks associated with activities like driving, but those are risks virtually everyone in society accepts or ignores so that we can continue enjoying the convenience afforded by speeding about in a motor vehicle. But as for immediate or in the moment risks, these are comparatively rare in the modern world. However, if you peruse the shopping trolley, restaurant plate, or dinner menu of almost every Australian today (possibly even your own) you would see that multiple times every day people ingest "food" that is Almost Certain (likelihood category) to have Catastrophic or Major consequences. If I plug both of these into the handy PA matrix, I end up with an activity that is deemed high risk, the highest level there is. And yet no-one blinks an eye. How is it that no-one has thought to mitigate these risks?

In reality, I think we are probably all pretty shit at accurately assessing risk. Any risk beyond immediate threat to life or limb is pretty much outside our evolutionary wheelhouse to evaluate; and then there are the known risks that we conveniently ignore so that we can go on fuelling our various addictions, our inability to accurately assess our own ability, the vagaries of environment, weather, paddling partners and the great mass of "unknown unknowns" which we can't even begin to imagine. If you throw all these things into a giant melting pot what comes out is a gelatinous morass; a slippery mess of goop impossible to fit with any degree of rigour into a cross-tabulated matrix that purports to have anything to do with risk mitigation.