A rainy Saturday marks the end of another week in lockdown. After Sunday's failure on Erics Ridge, I went out for one of my regular loop walks on Monday and, as commonly happens, a simple stroll turned into bushwacking and scrambling up headlands composed of decomposing friable rock. Ah well, the view was good.
After being a rock climber for multiple decades, I have finally started hang-boarding. Perhaps my mediocre performance as a climber is due to NOT hang-boarding for decades but I have always felt I had way more prominent weaknesses to work than my fingers. Now, twice a week, I do an "integrated strength workout" as per Steve Bechtel and hang during my strength sessions. I am climbing better, I think, but I am also aware of how subjective rock climbing can be.
This week I had two days out climbing, plus a couple of sessions on my wall. One day was doing some bouldering in the local forest which was both good and bad as there are hundreds of boulders but the granite tends to exfoliate which does not inspire confidence on high top-outs with no spotter.
On Wednesday evening, I carried all my overnight gear up the hill behind our suburb into the woods and, after a couple of hours strolling along the single track scaring up the occasional kangaroo, I found a campsite for the night and set up my tent and fluffed out my new sleeping bag. After my last bushwacking bout with inadequate gear I had decided that I was going to replace all my junky worn out crap with gear that actually functioned appropriately. So I had a wonderfully bright head-lamp (with a lock function so it does not turn on in your pack), and my new sleeping bag and spent a quiet night in the woods with only the frapping of frogs and some very weird bird calls as accompaniment. In the morning, I walked for another hour or so until I came to a sunny, grassy area where I brewed up some cowboy coffee and enjoyed the early morning.
On my way home, I met a fellow traveller also carrying a pack around and keeping fit during the lockdown. He was brewing tea on a little jet-boil stove by the side of the trail and we had a nice chat about the benefits of walking in the woods. It was a moment out of a Thoreau book.
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