Bouldering and Better Than Nothing

If you looked at my blog you would think all I had done for the last three weeks was scroll through Instagram selfies and watch bouldering videos. And, while I have watched some bouldering videos (I have kind of a girl crush on Alex Puccio), my loathing for social media has not changed all that much. Mostly, my blog has been dead because I've been out doing stuff and don't seem to have had a sufficiently long space of time to write anything up. 

 

Tidal river in the bush below my Mum's house

So, I looked back at our trip database - what, you don't have a trip database - get one immediately, if only for the "this day in history" nostalgia you can indulge in - and looked at all the things I had been doing. Most of them are short little mini-adventure trips that I'll group together in the next couple of blog posts. 

 

Doug on one of the Shire crags

Fairly recently, I spent about 10 days in Sydney rescuing my Mum from a wacky medical system where life-style illnesses are treated piecemeal with various medications and no actual life-style change. Yeah, roll that around in your head for a while. Science has worked out how to send people into space but our brightest doctors still prescribe one or more medications for each symptom of a single life-style induced condition instead of just changing the circumstances that produced the symptoms in the first place. Frankly, if you get out of the medical system in just slightly worse condition than you went in, you are doing extraordinarily well.

 

Jannali bouldering: Puccio would make short work of this

Anyway, while I was in Sydney, between wrangling with medical professionals, I went bouldering. My Mum lives in the Shire, not the one from the well known Tolkien series, but the Sutherland Shire and there is a lot of climbing and bouldering in the Shire. No big walls, just lots of little sandstone cliffs scattered all over the place, many within easy walking distance of where my Mum lives. Most days I would get out for an hour or so of bouldering which was terrific fun and probably where my girl crush on Puccio started. 

 

A problem real boulderers would not bother with

On a similar theme, I finished up work on what I call, Bogan Wall. It's a small granite area nearby named after the three or four wrecked cars at the base. It's not Puccio style, being slabby rather than powerful, but it is within walking distance and it is climbing, and I call that better than nothing.