Years ago, we were on a climbing trip in Washington’s Cascade Mountains and were mostly rock climbing out of Icicle Creek Canyon. A windy dirt road follows Icicle Creek west from the nearby town of Leavenworth. Leavenworth is one of those weird tourist towns that are built to be something else. Bavarian towns that aren’t in Germany seem popular. Leavenworth is a Bavarian town while British Columbia in Canada has it’s own “Little Bavaria” in Kimberley near the Purcell Mountains. Going to some place that pretends to be some other place but actually isn’t has always seemed odd to me. Like going to Disney Land to visit an artificial forest when you could go to a real forest, or the “pyramids” on the Las Vegas strip. Both towns, however, are popular. Of course, we avoided Leavenworth and the whole Bavarian scene as if it was infected by plague, camping instead at one of the rustic campgrounds by the Icicle River.
Anyway, we had spent too much time in a somewhat frustrating search for a crag called the Pearly Gates which is situated some 300 or 400 vertical metres above Icicle Creek and accessed by, what was in those days, a somewhat scrappy climbers track. The only guidebook available then was poorly written and directions to the crags were given in miles from a certain point along Icicle Creek Road but, if you had car with distance in kilometres, this always required a conversion to miles and if you were not at the exact right spot to start your odometer – say for instance you were camped part way up Icicle Creek – it was well nigh impossible to work out where the crag was located.
Our notes from the trip indicate that we had to cross four separate branches of Snow Creek on logs to get onto the climbers trail and given this was early spring, the creeks were running fast and high with snow melt. Nevertheless, we finally made it to the climbing area. The first route we climbed had a psychotic mountain goat guarding the exit from the slab climb onto the belay ledge. Doug spent a good deal of time standing on tiny holds on a granite slab after leading a somewhat poorly protected route trying to gain access to the belay ledge past the goat which went back and forth not only across the ledge but up and down the slab in an agitated manner. If my recollection is anywhere near correct, Doug finally sidled past the goat to the anchor when he realized that if he stayed on the slab any longer he would simply grease right off.
This modest debacle was compounded when we realised our rope was not long enough to abseil off so we had to traverse exposed terrain to try to find another anchor from which our rope still did not reach the ground so we ended up traversing back to the original anchor again. All of this traversing was on a greasy ledge in rock shoes above a 30 metre cliff. We then had the bright idea of Doug lowering me to the ground on a single strand of rope, thinking that rope stretch might mean we could actually reach the ground. I got my tip-toes on the ground just as the halfway mark on our rope slid through Doug’s belay device, so we figured it was a go and with good knots in both ends of the rope, Doug abseiled to the ground.
I don’t remember much more about climbing at that particular crag but I suspect most of it was pretty ordinary. But what has all this to do with goannas? Well, climbing today, Doug was leading up a final slab to the anchor when he encountered a large goanna flat out on the rock in the sun. Goannas have frightfully long and sharp claws, talons really, and when agitated or disturbed they puff themselves up to look bigger than they are – although a really large goanna often seems as big as a small crocodile anyway – and hiss menacingly. Given that goannas are a predatory animal, it’s wise to treat them with a degree of respect. Although rare, there have been goanna attacks.
After standing about on the slab for about five minutes engaged in a staring contest with the goanna, the reptile finally decided it might sunbake somewhere else just as comfortably and it ambled away. That’s the thing with outdoor sports, something interesting is always just about to happen.
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