Unburdened By What Has Been: Gooandra Hut and Hill

 You have not arrived. Keep searching. And be grateful for having the freedom to do so. Mark Twight.

We took our new van all the way to Bullock Hill campsite in Kosciusko National Park for a couple of nights. Seven hundred kilometres for three nights and way, way, way too far. Our drive to activity ratio was so bad that I could not bear to calculate it. Why did we go? Well, for that, you can blame cognitive dissonance.

Like most people, except perhaps literally Hitler (and, no matter what the far left tells you Trump is not Hitler), I like to think of myself as a reasonable person who is willing make personal sacrifices if it helps another human. The rubber of course, hits the proverbial road when the personal sacrifice looms ahead and you have to choose to willingly sacrifice time and money to act in accordance with what a reasonable person would do. This is the beauty of luxury beliefs and why they plague society. Signalling your position as an empathetic and caring person comes with zero skin in the game. Put skin in the game, and, if you aren’t careful, you can find yourself feeling just a wee bit resentful of how cognitive dissonance causes you to act against your own best interest. Resentment, like anger is not a good emotion to carry about with you, the load becomes unbearably heavy very quickly. Luckily, once we realise we are not our emotions, we can let them go and, to quote Kamala Harris “be unburdened by what has been” – although I could never understand (did anyone?) what she was banging on about.

So, it was cognitive dissonance that drove us to drive (see how I did that?) on Sunday, with peak traffic up the highway to Canberra, all the way to the Snowy Mountains highway and Denisons Campground where we arrived around 7:00 pm feeling flogged by traffic, driving and the push to get the van into some kind of usable shape before we left. Denisons is a pretty campground, an open area dotted with big gums, wombat holes and macropods. We wandered along the Eucumbene River as darkness moved in and there was some relief from the flies. The flies are always bad up at the Snowy Mountains, I’m not sure why, but perhaps the excess of feral horses is one reason. Despite efforts at culling, feral horses are everywhere as are flies and horse shit.

Early the next morning we got back on the road and drove through Kiandra to Bullocks Hill campground where we met M and R. The goal for the day was a walk into Gooandra Hut on the slight height of land between Gooandra Creek and Tantangara Creek. R’s distant ancestors had a grazing lease in the area some time long ago. Lots of people get really interested in their family history at a certain stage of life. Thankfully, I have not reached that stage yet and secretly hope I never will. One of my brothers went through this stage and produced a detailed family history, since lost somewhere in the course of time passing. I feel grateful for that, it’s left me “unburdened by what has been.” Many people who are close to their families get interested in the heritage of their clan, but, more surprising are the number of people who really don’t seem to like their relatives yet investigate proudly back through the generations gaining some satisfaction from their ancestors achievements. There’s nought so queer as folk as the Yorkshire folk would say (my mother is from Barnsley, Yorkshire). I steadfastly believe in the here and now, the only historical place where I have any influence, plus it leaves me “unburdened by what has been.”

But back to Gooandra. P arrived shortly before 9 am and, as a party of five, we set off on a rough bridle (read horse) track that wrapped around a little hillock (which I later walked up on another rough horse trail) to Gooandra Creek and a junction with the main fire trail near Tantangara Plain. The fire road is now a solid gravel road as part of the Snowy Hydro project and only a mere 1.5 kilometres from the Gooandra Hut. The flies were astonishing, but not too, too bad when there was a bit of breeze.

We were a long time at the hut. I wandered downhill on another horse trail and found a good spring with fresh running water, although you would want to treat it well before drinking – the amount of horse shit around is as astonishing as the fly population. I was doing my usual chafing at the bit (a horsey metaphor) at the slow pace so bid the remainder of the party happy travels and took the long way back. This involved walking south along Gooandra Trail to a very old road – visible only as a slight dimple in the surrounding grasslands which I followed north up the course of the Eucumbene River – just a small creek at this elevation. When the dimple ended, I walked uphill across lumpy grasslands but no bush to Gooandra Hill where there is a trig and some kind of government installation. A rough road runs north out to the Snowy Mountains Highway which I followed until it joined the highway and then I walked back across the grasslands to camp not interested in walking on the highway with vehicles swishing past.

The next day, M, R and P drove north for 35 kilometres along a dirt road to Blue Waterholes where they had a short wander about. Doug and I were loathe to get back in the vehicle and cast about for an activity for the day. Without driving, our options were limited to long walks on gravel roads going mostly nowhere special (there are some rivers and huts to walk to) and returning the same way, or driving a short distance up the highway to the Yarrangobillly precinct where there are some limestone caves, a river, a warm spring and some short tourist tracks. We opted for Yarrangobilly and did all the short walks and had a swim in the pool. Back at camp, I found an indistinct horse trail that led up a little hillock behind camp, and the evening passed, thankfully with a decent wind to keep the fly population in check.

Wednesday was a long drive back home, rainy up at the Snowies, but hot and humid down on the coast. Here’s what I learnt from all that driving:

• It’s not always possible to choose what you do unless you are willing to be ruthlessly selfish. I’m pretty selfish, but, apparently not that ruthlessly selfish.
• Kamala Harris is right; it is good to be unburdened by what has been. Let both old and new resentments go. Reality is unchanged by negative attitudes and you and everyone around you will have a better day, week, year, life, by re-framing reality to see the best in people rather than the worst. Excepting Hitler, he was a pretty evil dude.
• It’s good to play with different ideas because there is no hard and fast reality – excepting my previous statement about reality above – and we might find a better way by trying a different idea or, if you will, a different frame.

The Purpose Is The Revolution

The deload week ended yesterday and we went rock climbing. I usually schedule my deload weeks for periods when I am up in Sydney but, after my last trip north, I realised that sleeping only 4 or 5 hours a night, spending hours sitting with my Mum or in traffic, not eating well, and being inundated with city noise, smells and people is actually more stressful on the body than all the training and trips I do at home. I didn’t do nothing, I still trained four days (very easy lifting and climbing just to keep the body moving), I went bouldering and I did an upwind/downwind kayak run, but, it was a true deload week and I felt better for it.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is to not do something. This is not how our society works. The experts always tell us about the latest new thing we have to do in order to be healthy, or moral or compassionate or whatever the modish catch phrase is. These goal posts move continually and, if you observe this phenomena, you might realise that the purpose is the revolution and the endless failure of most of us to reach the end point is a feature not a bug.

There are dozens and dozens of examples of this. The latest one I saw was vegetable consumption. Dietitians are now claiming that in order to have a “healthy diet” at least 10 different vegetables must be eaten each day or even each meal. I eat a lot of vegetables, I eat vegetables at every meal (including breakfast), and my lunch time salad is big enough to fill a good sized mixing bowl. I love vegetables, but I’m not healthy because I eat vegetables. I’m healthy because I don’t eat sugar, grains or industrial seed oils. I don’t eat processed foods, and I eat a lot of animal protein. The vegetables are nice but not necessary. What is most important are the things I don’t eat.

Eating 10 different vegetables at each meal has to be peak luxury belief. I counted the number of different vegetables I had in my fridge immediately after my weekly shop. If I double counted (red onions and brown onions were counted as two different types of vegetables) I had 12 different vegetables in my fridge. But here’s the thing: I live in an area with good access to fresh vegetables, I can afford to buy fresh vegetables, I have a massive fridge in which I can store fresh vegetables, I have continuous electricity and running water. I am privileged. And, yet, privileged as I am, the thought of making not just one meal but three meals a day which include 10 different vegetables was overwhelming. This is a goal post that, even with everything stacked in my favour I will never meet. And that’s the point. The average person will never meet the goal posts because as soon as the average person gets close, the elites move the goal posts.

In the wake of the astounding outcome of the recent US presidential election, this is something our political and cultural elite would do well to grapple with. The continual shifting of goal posts on every facet of life which ensure that the average person fails is not sustainable policy. At a certain point, the average him/her or they who just wants to get on with life, is going to issue a very big F**k You (my apologies to those offended by this language) and act accordingly.

Rock Climbing With Round Numbers

 At nine pitches, Doug was ready to quit for the day, while I had fallen apart on pitch eight but recovered a little by pitch nine. Ten pitches however, is such a nice round number, like your typical 50 kilometre day. In pursuit of ten, Doug belayed me while I led the last pitch but, in typical restrained Doug style, he passed on the climb so I cleaned the route on abseil.

I only had three real climbing days in October, and one of those was with my nephew at ClimbFit in Kirrawee. ClimbFit is super fun, and climbing with Mitch who hurls himself up the routes with great enthusiasm but less skill is also super fun, but it’s not climbing outside, and every time I go - which is every time I am in Sydney - I think how much it is not like climbing outside, but still super fun.

So, I got to thinking on the walk out, when was the last time I climbed 10 pitches in a day and how many pitches was an average climbing day when we lived in Nelson and climbed a lot more frequently? What is the point of all these comparisons you might wonder when “comparison is the thief of joy?” Well, comparison when done solely against your previous performance/ability is a measure of how well you are holding back the tide of ageing. Plateau, as the saying goes, is the new PB (personal best) if you are on the dark side of 60. While I did not get out climbing much in October, I did climb a lot more on my home wall and, all the time my forearms and glutes were getting painfully pumped, I was hoping that the training would hold off the inevitable decline in rock climbing performance.

So what does the database show: In July, I did 11 pitches in a day – my notes say I fell off a couple of routes (sad face) – while in May I climbed 15 pitches – but they were mostly short pitches of under 15 metres so they are worth less than a rope stretcher of 30 full metres up the Slocan Valley north of Nelson, BC. But, putting aside pitch length and difficulty and whether or not the routes were sport or traditional, these numbers aren’t bad. In fact, they are pretty good compared to my old Canadian days, bearing in mind we climbed a lot more trad and multi-pitch routes back in North America, both of which consume more time.

So I guess comparison is not all bad but I that might be because on this one metric, things don’t look too grim.