Depivation Increases Capacity

I often think that life gets smaller as we age. It's hard not to confront the reality of this living in a street of - mostly - retired older people and with a mother who now resides in an aged care facility. I have lived on this suburban street for three years and there are some people - a few doors up or down - that I have never seen outside, and quite a few neighbours who only go out once a week to stock up on groceries.

I don't know whether this is truly an inevitable part of aging or whether with an active lifestyle, a meat and vegetable diet, a positive attitude and engagement in a community we can defer this shrinking isolation until the very end of life. I'd like to think the latter is possible but I am not arrogant enough to think that I am any kind of exception to a rule.

I do, however, agree with Dan John that "deprivation increases capacity." Deprivation is such a negative word and not a condition that anyone in the modern world wants to willingly endure¹. In fact, most of modern life has become relentless journey to avoid deprivation and embrace comfort. We have become a society that self-medicates with food, drink, and possessions.

I was reminded of this recently when one of the youth in my life - all of mid-20's - told me they must have a toilet in the campervan they were renting for a few days. Doug and I lived in a three metre caravan with no toilet for six years, and on our last visit to Canada (2019) we spent five months travelling around in a Honda Odyssey with a few boards for a bed, a two burner gas stove and an esky. We lived in that minivan through rain, snow, sun, and wind, and I can't say I ever missed the fact that we did not have a toilet. Before toilets was squatting and if you want to build capacity do a bunch of squatting.

I used to listen to a training podcast where the host had a philosophy of not being "beholden" (his words) to anything in life. Every so often he would go six weeks without beer, or coffee, or some other item in his life that was a habit. That always seemed like a good philosophy to me. Never get into a position where there is some external thing in your life that you cannot go without. Deprivation builds capacity.

A month or so without something in your life that you previously deemed absolutely necessary but without which you survived or even thrived gives you confidence to try something even bigger and harder next time.

If you have to start small enjoying deprivation and building capacity, do so. Go one week or one day without eating any processed food, or without drinking alcohol or coffee. Stand instead of sit, sit on the floor instead of in a conventional chair. Deprivation increases capacity. Practice this everyday and watch your world expand again.

1Isn't it interesting that I used the word "endure" and not "embrace" or "enjoy"?

A Weekend In The Budawangs: Round, Fosters and Square Top Mountains

 Preamble:

There is always a bit of trepidation when you enter the Budawangs on a two day walking trip planning to spend at least half the distance off track. The bush-whacking could be light and easy or thick and difficult. Despite using all our "pattern recognition" skills, Doug and I have been unable to come up with any "rules of thumb" to predict which of these two extremes we will encounter.

Ridges may be relatively clear or horrendously thick with wattle regrowth overlain with entangling vines; flats could be open and easy or full of tangled burnt scrub as tenacious as wire cable. I have been out weekly in different areas of bush burnt in the great fires of 2019/2020 covering a wide geographic area from north of Ulladulla to as far south as well into Victoria and have not been able to develop a reliable predictive mental model. The only sensible strategy is to hope for the best but be prepared for the worst where the worst is a travel speed of one kilometre per hour or less.

Day 1: Square Top and Fosters Mountains

Alison, coming from Canberra, opened the bidding at starting to walk at 9.00 or 9.30 am at which I shuddered. Short winter days, a reasonable distance to travel, unknown bush-whacking all mean "early start" to me, plus, I have been starting early for over 30 years and have yet to find many convincing reasons to change that. Push back from me and we agree to meet at the Nerriga pub at 8.00 am. Sneakily, Alison later pushed that on to 8.15 am but even I am not such a stickler to argue about 15 minutes.

Heading into the parking area, I immediately miss the turn convinced that I will remember this non-descript drive from the last time I did this non-descript drive. Luckily, Doug pulled me up and, after checking the topographic map, we realised our error and turned around. There was only one other car at the parking area. Alison, like many Australians, worries about car break-ins. Doug and I don't. We have insurance and I have a philosophy of not letting my life be consumed by too many fairly unlikely "what if's." Life has enough risks without creating new ones.

We started the day walking south along the Alum Fire Trail for about 5.5 kilometres. I half expected this section to feel a little tedious, most people don't like fire trail walking although fire trails do make reasonable running routes, and, last time we had been in this area we had cycled this section of road. But, the fire trail walking passed quickly as we were having that perennial discussion - which must have surfaced when guidebooks first arrived - about how much information about outdoor routes should be shared online. Alison had just read this article, a not particularly original or creative look at the issue and was in the "don't share" camp.

I suspect that a lot of the "don't share" perspective is more about elitism and protecting your own turf - and I include your ego as turf - than any real desire to protect a dwindling resource, but that is a topic for another blog post and another day. Suffice it to say that I have been hearing this argument for a quarter of a century while real participation - not strolling to a road side lookout or following a short well-graded trail - precipitously declines. Average people just don't adventure as much as they used to. At the pointy end, there is radical exploration and expanding of boundaries, but, the middle road, where most of us live is increasingly sedentary and unwilling to endure discomfit.

West of Flat Top Mountain we left the fire trail and contoured across the head of Running Creek until we intersected Flat Top fire trail. Quite a few of even the smaller creeks were running and we paddled across some boggy wet ground on the flats just west of the fire trail.

Lunch was taken on a log in fitful winter sun; it felt pretty chilly with a stiff wind blowing, and then we walked uphill through light bush to the base of Flat Top Mountain. Following the base of the cliff line east was easy - the bases of these pagoda like peaks often seem to provide easy travel with minimal bush and we passed a couple of big caves. The pass onto Flat Top Mountain was marked with a cairn which is unnecessary as it is very obvious. An easy gully with one chimney move near the top and then we were on slabs of sandstone overlooking Fosters Mountain to the east. I insisted on tagging the absolute top although it is hard to tell with these peaks and the summit area is fairly scrubby.

Back down at the packs we walked easily down to the saddle between Flat Top and Fosters Mountain and a 50 metre climb took us to the base of the cliffs on Fosters Mountain. A short distance south, Alison found the pass and we scrambled easily up another gully to the top. The summit of Fosters Mountain is currently pleasantly open and, if it had not been for the strong winds, we likely would have found a scenic camp. As it was blowing strongly and grey clouds were scudding overhead we put our rain jackets on and walked east to the very top of the mountain and then ambled north along the top of the eastern cliff line. We had good views into the Styles plains and along the peaks of the main Budawang Range.

The pass at the northern end of Fosters Mountain pretty much directly overlooks 17R, the rocky little outlier to the northwest, and another easy gully descent led to the base of Fosters Mountain. Alison had a yen to camp in a cave, so we followed the cliff line around to the north for some distance but found nothing suitable.

I was happy enough to camp in the valley. Our sleeping bags are somewhere between 30 and 35 years old and have worn as thin as tissue paper so a lower camp out of the wind meant a warmer night for Doug and I. Alison appears to be kitted out with much newer and better gear than us, but, then, that probably holds true for most of the other people we know. Doug and I hate shopping and consuming almost as much as we detest the LNP, and, in preference to actually buying something, we will suffer long with inadequate and poorly functioning gear. Truth is, most of us don't fail to reach our goals because of inadequate gear but because of inadequate effort.

Down we went into the valley and just as it was getting dark, we found a campsite near the head of Grassy Creek. I think I managed to stay out of the tent until 7.00 pm that night which is close to a record as it was two hours after sunset!

Day 2: Round Mountain and Endrick River

Unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons, some of which definitely fall into the interpersonal category, we had not as a group discussed our exit plan. I had come up with a few different options, none of which were perfectly satisfactory and involved varying distances from 20 kilometres on fire trails to 10 to 11 kilometres, with about half of that off-trail. Nevertheless, we set off heading north along Round Mountain fire trail the next morning.

Alison and I left our packs at the Styles Creek/Round Mountain fire trail junction and walked uphill to the base of 17R in search of a route to the top. This little outlier is lower than Fosters Mountain but stares down at you cheekily teasing the walker to find a route to the top. Once we reached the base of the cliffs, we circled around in a clockwise direction scrambling through a little gully separating a rock peninsula on the south from the main 17R. Near the northern end, we found another gully which we easily scrambled up to the about six metres below the summit and circled again, this time counter clockwise, around this well defended but small eminence. The main summit is overhung by crumbling sandstone cliffs and we had to be content with scrambling up a small rock platform to the north.

Meanwhile, Doug walked on to the base of Round Mountain and waited for us there. Round Mountain has an easy pass on the northeastern end but the best way up is to hike up the northeast spur ridge and then sidle south and west around the base of the cliffs to gain the top of the plateau and then walk over, now open since the bushfires, sandstone slabs to the top. Last time we went up Round Mountain the summit area was choked with vegetation. This time we had good views of the mountains we had ascended on this and previous trips.

I had hoped that we might have a reasonable discussion of our planned route back to the parking lot from the summit of Round Mountain where we could look at the map and the terrain at the same time. This is one of my keys to moving efficiently and I had brought up my map and compass to enable such a discussion. Ultimately, that plan did not work out and we walked back down to our packs before seriously considering our exit options.

By this time it was after noon, and we had five hours of daylight left. Ample time for a couple of our exit options which involved mostly fire trail walking, but a questionable amount of time for a long bush-whack across only slightly undulating terrain to intersect the Alum fire trail. That distance was somewhere between four and five kilometres. Any reasonable bush-walker would think that easily achievable in the available time, but, there were so many unknowns, the most important being how bad is the scrub. The guidebook describes this route as best avoided due to the scrub which is "very thick and denies even determined access."

Alison was either cheerily optimistic or patently deluded, I could not tell which, but her plan to "follow ridges" did not seem to guarantee success given we would be in dense scrub on "ridges" that were only 10 metres above the surrounding plains. Theoretically possible, but in practice, likely requiring slow and careful navigation. Plus what of that bush? If we got half-way across and found ourselves in one kilometre per hour terrain - a situation I have been in more times than I care to remember since the bush-fires - we might actually find ourselves bush-whacking by headlamp, an even slower endeavour. And, of course, Doug and I have dud headlamps because of a chronic inability to complete the necessary shopping to replace them.

The only time I have come close to being mistakenly benighted in 35 years of outdoor adventuring was with a misguided walking group in Tasmania under the guidance of leader with poor navigation skills but undue optimism, and I thought now as I did then, "nope, not gonna happen."

And, it did not. In the end, we decided on a route that I think, in hindsight, was by far the most expeditious and even scenic. We followed the Round Mountain fire trail to the confluence of Sallee Creek and the Endrick River and easily forded to the northern bank, bush-whacked through light forest and some marsh to intersect the Red Ground track about 7 kilometres from the car park.

A pleasant stroll along the fire trail across open plains overshadowed by escarpments to the south of Bulee Brook, one more ford of the Endrick River and we were back at the cars with enough time to almost squeak back to our house on the coast just as darkness fell.

Life Is Not An Ever Rising Trajectory

Goals, we should all have them, and the bolder the better. Mostly, I think that if your goals are well formulated, you have a solid plan which involves habit change, and you work consistently and steadily, you will be successful. But that does not mean that each individual day or session brings success. Goal attainment, as anyone who has worked at a long term goal can tell you, is a step wise process of lurching ahead, falling back a little, then gaining ground. Although humans like to see life as a linear ever rising trajectory, little, if anything in life actually falls out this way.

I have come to view goals as a process oriented activity. Choose the goal, make the plan, follow the plan, adapt and change the plan as new information comes along, in an iterative cycle. Success is judged not by whether or not you met the goal on any given day - although that is ultimately the target - but by how well you followed the plan. A process oriented mind set enables you to keep steadily working away, success feeding success, even if the end point is still many months or years away.

In a world of instant gratification and fake social media, the truth of meeting goals - consistency, habit change and iterative plan making - has been lost amid staged photo-shoots and general fakery. Having a process oriented approach means every session is a win and you won't have to resort to the dreadful revisionist history where you pretend you did not want that goal anyway.

The picture below is sunrise from my home bay this morning.  Worth getting up for. 

The Shared Language Of Adventure

Years ago, while living in Calgary, we knew a couple who got heavily enmeshed in the world of personal development Tony Robbins style. Not actually Tony Robbins or his company, but a similar type of business the name of which, after all these years, I can't remember, if I ever knew it.

This couple were quite evangelical about their program of personal development. I remember that because I went to an introductory seminar with the female partner of the couple, and, while I did not succumb to the seductions of the well orchestrated speaking program which promised to make all my dreams come true, some other mutual friends did.

Strangely, the one thing I remember about the introductory seminar I went to was the pneumatic breasts of the female presenter. They were far too perfect and this was in a time when cosmetic plastic surgery was not that common and those big and seemingly impeccable hooters were pretty obviously fake. Which is odd in a personal development guru, but perhaps the universe gifted her the knockers she had always wanted. I don't know. What I do know, is that they would have been costly back then so clearly the personal development gig was a lucrative one.

This, however, is all a rather wordy digression from the main point of the story which is that the couple or the movement more precisely - because I noticed the same thing in other mutual acquaintances who were drawn into the circle of endless personal development - had their own language in which they communicated. I don't mean a different language with a new alphabet, but a language of idiom that was so idiosyncratically the language of personal development that it was unmistakable.

Whilst engaged in the boring but necessary duties of modern life today - you know, taking out the bins, vacuuming the floors - I was listening to a climbing podcast and two guys talking about adventuring, and I instantly recognised the language because, it turns out, adventurers have a shared language as well. Climbers, paddlers, skiers - combatants in the "adrenaline" sports have long been known to have a common language. Spend an evening among normal folk and pepper your conversation with crimps, flashes, beta-spray, not to mention pink point, red point, and head point, and soon your dinner companions will be searching for an exit strategy as quickly as Scott Morrison looks for an excuse or a photo opportunity.

The main benefit of shared language, however, is not that it allows us to quickly and comprehensively describe the climb, the river or the ski descent, but that it allows adventurers to recognise each other.

I spent an hour or so today talking to a guy who had just bought a second hand kayak and was interested in joining our state wide sea kayak club. The first thing any sea kayaker will do in this situation is find out what boat the new paddler has acquired because, in the absence of a sea kayak you can't really kayak on the sea; the place where wind, tide and swell rule. Just like you cannot ski in the backcountry without touring bindings, skis and boots, there is one absolute piece of equipment required for paddling on the sea and that is a sea-worthy boat.

It turns out, perhaps unhappily for this guy, that he bought a lake boat with no front bulkhead - among other deficiencies - so I had to break it to him that his plan to paddle the high seas in this boat was going nowhere. A tough task, and I am not sure he believed me, after all, the shop assistant at the "other" kayak store had told him to stuff the bow with pool noodles. Sure, I had a vision, as do you now, of the kayak pitch-poling in the surf and the brightly coloured pool noodles exploding out into the swash zone with kayak going one way, paddler another, and a dozen pool noodles every which way. Of course, that is not even the half of the issue, how would this boat handle wind, waves, tides, swell; it would not, of course, it is a lake boat. But we had no shared language with which I could explain this.

So I talked about wind and weather cocking, swell, and sea, tidal currents and all the things that meant that this boat was not equipped to go onto the open ocean, but we had no shared language of adventure and so he could not understand why this boat - reviewed as "handling waves well" in Mens Journal - was not going to work.

One winter in Nelson, I had a new guy come along on an early season ski trip I was leading for our local mountaineering club, equipped, on the advice of the local gear shop owner, in big heavy boots, wide skis and the most robust, and coincidentally heavy (and expensive) touring bindings on the market. When he asked our opinion of his new set up, we said the only thing possible, "all your gear is too heavy and you won't be able to keep up." Another tough conversation as he had just dropped several thousand dollars on this shiny new and weighty gear. He dismissed this out of hand as the shop owner, who clearly knew more than us, had assured him that this was the gear he needed for the backcountry. New guy made it half an hour from the parking lot before turning back exhausted.

And, it was all so obvious because we had no shared language of adventure, not with any of the shop owners or the ski guy or the new kayak guy.