"I think we are on the Castle track" I say to Doug as we clamber up boulders and tree roots on the eroded "trail" to Castle Pass. It is eight years since I last walked into Monolith Valley, but only four since we climbed The Castle on a sunny day in summer, and, somehow, I have come to think that we have inadvertently missed the spot where the track forks with the southern most leading to Meakins Pass and the route up The Castle, while the north fork climbs steadily to Castle Pass.
We check our topographic maps on our device, and, of course, we are not on the path marked. Momentarily, we forget how inaccurate these maps are, and how imprecise is my memory, and I drop back down 50 metres looking for the "track." There is no other track, and, I climb back up again to Doug. We have been walking, or more appropriately, engaged in full body gymnastics on what passes for the trail, for 2.5 hours and Doug wants a break. I, of course, have come equipped with over-ambitious plans and hopes of climbing Mounts Nibelung, Owen, Cole, and Shrouded Gods in the three days we have available and am anxious to get into Monolith Valley.
Looking at the topographic map, this should all be relatively simple; elevation gain into Monolith Valley is only 700 metres - and, although I am way on the wrong side of 50, I can still walk uphill at a respectable 350 metres an hour with an overnight pack - and each peak rises only 100 metres from Monolith Valley. The distance separating them also is not great, a few kilometres at most. But all that, seen readily on the topographic map belies travel in the Budawangs where the bush is thick, and the terrain convulsed with cliffs and buttresses not shown on any map.
It takes us almost 3.5 hours to reach Castle Pass, which seems way too long for the distance and elevation gain by anyone's standards, but then again, walking into the Budawangs by this route has always involved hip-high step-ups, clambering over tree roots suspended a metre off the trail due to erosion, sidling between tight boulders, and crawling through caves. We have lunch at Castle Pass and then turn our attention towards the next pass, Nibelung Pass.
The track turns to the west and heads into an other worldly valley of sandstone pagodas, columns and turrets, patches of deep green rainforest vegetation in dark clefts with verdant palms and ferns, sandstone arches, dripping waterfalls between mossy walls, and, before the fires, dense, wiry, virtually impenetrable vegetation - twisted banksias and spiny hakea. Since the fires of 2019/2020 the scrub is much reduced, visibility improved, but the track through Monolith Valley is as hard, or perhaps harder to follow than ever as large trees have obscured the foot bed in places, and months when the park was closed reduced traffic.
At the chains, we meet another party who have walked through from Wog Wog, and wait while they lower packs down before we scamper up. I had hoped to scramble up Mount Nibelung before climbing to the top of Shrouded Gods, but, the only information I had for Nibelung was that it was reached by "scrambling up a steeply rising gully." A bit vague given there are many steeply rising gullies on the north side of Mount Nibelung. I am not averse to exploring, but, if we had to go up and down multiple gullies to find the right one, we would run out of time, so, we opted to head up Shrouded Gods instead.
Now the route to Shrouded Gods should be quite simple and it would have been had we been on the track, but, we had lost the track almost as soon as we clambered up the chains at Nibelung Pass and had wandered off to the west. Later, we discovered that, if we had been on the Monolith Valley track we would have gone right past a small cairn marking the start of the route to Shrouded Gods. As it was, we bushbashed over to the base of a buttress on the west side of Shrouded Gods and then had to slowly, impeded as we were by thick vegetation bash back to the east. Eventually, after much thrashing, we found a promising looking gully and headed up.
A short distance up, a chimney move was required to surmount a big chockstone and we passed our packs up. A little further and a low angle chimney on the right had a slither of black rope hanging down it and we surmised this chimney would the secret to reaching the top. We had brought a section of 8 mm climbing rope with us and used this to haul the packs so we could chimney up the last steep section unencumbered. Most of the way, it is easy enough to wriggle up with pack on but the last section requires some true chimney moves. As usual in Australia, the rope left as a handline was some kind of junky nylon stuff from K-Mart or the Reject Shop.
The rest of the way was easy. We crossed the top of the gully we had initially started up and then found a faint pad along a treed ledge that led up to ironstone plates on sandstone and easy scrambling to top. Once on top we wandered around easily as the scrub had been heavily burnt and sticking to the outside edges we could walk on sandstone slabs. The highpoint on the map is 850 metres (roughly) and at the southern end of the large flat summit plateau which stretches two kilometres to the northeast.
The view is stunning. I think one of the best I have seen in the Budawangs. It is possible to see all the way along the east coast from Point Perpendicular to Wasp Island, and around the other compass points are the rugged peaks and plateaus of the remainder of the Budawang Range. This far above the valleys it is easy to forget how arduous and slow travel through the range actually is.
After finding a good campsite, we looked around for water. We had been hoping to find water in the small creeks that drain the summit plateau as there had been a reasonable amount of rain recently, but, they were reduced to dampness and we had to rely on puddles for drinking water. Sounds rough, but since moving to Australia my tolerance for suspect water sources has increased mightily.
By the time we brewed tea and had attempted to wash some of the dirt of the day away - we were both black with ash and soot - it was getting dark and time for a few last photos before the sunset.
It was a windy enough night that we decided to sleep in the valley somewhere the next night. I woke up at 5.30 am, just as the sun was rising, and enjoyed a brilliant but brief sunrise moment. Given the wind and our water sources, we decided to walk back down to the valley for breakfast. And thus began the 3/4 hour long search for the route off.
The afternoon before, our route to camp had seemed so simple that we had not made any cairns to mark the route or even paid much attention to landmarks. We both thought we knew the "way to get off" and we were both kind of wrong. The wind, which had reached blow us off the mountain point, really did not help as whenever we were near an edge, we were buffeted around severely.
Finally, we found a couple of cairns and a familiar looking tree, and, with no further trouble descended to the valley, where we found water, a sheltered flat slab of sandstone and settled down to breakfast.
Leaving Monolith Valley, we found a sheltered campsite near sandstone bluffs with water nearby and set up camp for the night. Then, we walked back to the north side of Mount Cole and cast around for, what the guidebook describes as "a trail to the summit." There is, of course, no trail, just rock ribs and gullies. Many gullies looked devilishly thick, but we chose one that did not look too bad and scrambled up some rock pagodas until we found ourselves on easy terrain strolling up ledges interspersed with short sandstone stacks that were easy to climb.
There was a cold front with fog and precipitation rolling in so we littered our route with small cairns in order to find our way back in poor visibility. The summit, which is flat and covered with dense burnt scrub was easily reached and then we strolled along sandstone slabs with glorious views until we were above Trawalla Falls. I was sorely tempted to walk south to the summit of Mount Cole, but, rain was falling in the distance and we have twice toyed with hypothermia in the Budawangs and had no need to repeat the experience.
Back at camp, we had tea, watched the fog and rain roll in, and crawled into the tent early to the sound of light rain.
Our last day was socked in and drizzly. We decided to forgo any attempts to climb other peaks, there would be no views today, and, with lots of fits and starts, finding and losing the track again, we walked back out.
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