This is the kind of trip report which you don’t really want to write because it makes you look like a complete dumb-arse. But we are all dumb-arses sometimes so here goes. On Sunday, after a couple of days of bush-walking, Doug and I drove over to an undisclosed State Forest to climb at a small crag. I’d marked the location (or what I thought was the location) on the topographic map. My pattern recognition primed brain saw a fire trail heading south from another fire trail and ending at a white area on the map (indicating no vegetation) with the hatched pattern that NSW topographic maps use to indicate a cliff line. This looked just like the little sketch map on the Crag Guide that I did not bother matching up latitude and longitude.
When we got to the State Forest however, we discovered that all the fire trails were closed except for one which runs north to south through the pine plantation. I had looked online before we left because, if you know anything about Australia, you will know that at any single point in time hundreds of hectares of public land are closed for one reason or another. There is nothing our bureaucracy likes more than closing public land because a twig has fallen or it might be a bit windy. Never waste an excuse to use an abundance of caution is the Australian motto.
It turns out, I discovered later, that the fire trails in this State Forest have been closed since 2022 because of damage to the roads due to wet weather. If you can do basic mathematics, that’s four years. I don’t actually mind closing fire trails to motorised transport. There is nothing in Australia’s constitution that says you have a right to drive everywhere and, as a culture, we drive way too much and use our own bodies way too little. But, if you are going to close fire trails just be courageous and do the difficult thing and shut them permanently to all but non-motorized users; instead of the “temporary become permanent” closures which is how most things are done. It’s cowardly.
Anyway, the roads were closed so we would have to walk in. We drove along the annoyingly corrugated open fire trail to an intersection and parked the van. We carried our rock climbing gear and set off. We were able to jump across the first ford, but further on where the road intersects a bigger river the road bed was completely flooded. We tried hopping across on various slippery logs which had toppled over but in the end had to take shoes off and wade across the knee deep river. A bit further on and we were able to balance with only a minor booter (a booter is when you accidentally get wet feet trying to cross a stream) across yet another creek.
I had my topographic map handy as there were many junctions we needed to make and at one point, noticing another small crag on the map I wondered if I might have marked the crag wrong. But we never seriously entertained the notion and kept walking. Eventually, we walked out to the turn around at a little lookout where bogans had been throwing their drink cans into the bush (half the reason roads get closed) and spent a goodly amount of time trying to find the crag. Nothing was quite right and the rock was not even conducive to climbing. Eventually, while we had lunch we pulled the latitude and longitude off the Crag guide and noticed we were indeed at the wrong location.
We had, however, blown through so much time that even though we would walk back past the crag we didn’t really have enough daylight to squeeze in a climb and drive home, so we walked on past contenting ourselves with catching a glimpse of some rock through the trees.
Ironically, when we got home, our handy trip database – in which we have recorded all our major trips for the better part of 30 years – indicated we had been to the crag before and climbed a few pitches!
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