It’s funny, but I can remember the scene almost as if it was yesterday: Doug and I have just crested a high ridge in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia. It is 9.30 pm, the sun has set and pink alpenglow bathes the landscape. A couple of hundred metres below, a few of tents cluster in a meadow surrounded by the jagged rocky and glaciated peaks of the Gold Range. Our camp. We have been on the move for over 16 hours in a quest to climb the striking saw tooth west ridge of Mount Grady, turning back after 10 hours of effort just 100 vertical metres, and about 500 horizontal metres from the summit; but out of time to get off the mountain and traverse the complicated terrain back to camp before dark. As it is, we stumble into camp, our headlamps bobbing and weaving, alerting our companions that we are back, just as full darkness falls. We unlace mountain boots, sink onto spongy alpine meadow, and gladly accept the hot drinks our team mates offer. It has been a glorious day in the mountains, tinged by the regret of failure, but one that I will remember for decades.
Twenty years ago there were so many of those days. Days stacked into weeks, weeks into months, and months inevitably into years. Hundreds of mountains, first ascents and new routes, traverses across entire ranges, following ridges into the sky, and glaciers into the valleys. A never ending parade of partners and plans, maps and air photos, climbing up and skiing down, a life time of wild places, cold frosty mornings, flaming mountain sunsets, and always the push to climb one more mountain, ski one more run, crest the rise of one more ridge, never content, never at rest, the day we returned from the mountains we set about planning the next visit. Failures niggled and nagged, frequently we went back, trying to even a score that never really existed because a mountain is not in competition with a human; there is no final tally that reveals a victor with a series of wins on the one side, losses on the other.
But somewhere along the way, as age creeps up, the burning bright fire of desire dims a little, and then a little more, and one day you realise that this is the year, the month, maybe today is even the single day wherein the knowledge that youth has gone and age has come finally settles deep into your bones, and can no longer be denied.
And so it is, sitting on a ridge overlooking the scraggy top of Mother Woila, the deeply trenched valleys, meandering rivers, and scratched out ragged rock gorges, across the great forested lands of the unroaded wilderness on the western edge of Deua National Park with daylight still in hand, not much daylight, but a few hours yet, the body stops and rests, and the mind follows suit. No longer burning with the white hot phosphorence of youth, the mind no longer has the power to push the body to do what is necessary to reach the summit. The summit itself somehow seems meaningless now. A scrappy scrub covered apex which will afford no better views than this spot here. A meaningless token to say you’ve stood upon the very top, reached after more soul (and body) destroying bush-wacking, not an aesthetic climb, merely a war of attrition won by simply perservering through tangled regrowth and lower even than the elevation at which the trip started.
And yet, failure is still tinged with regret. Not perhaps the regret of one summit missed, but the sad acceptance that no longer will life be written in the great highs and lows of big mountain summits and wild days across vast open spaces, because age and time just do not allow the body to travel as far, as fast, as expediently as before; and, more importantly, the mind loses its crisp, clear, bright, unwavering white desire.
The Deau; for some reason, the place exherts a strong siren pull, and, between other trips and activities, I frequently find myself scouring the topographic map looking for places between the ubitquitious fire roads for some interesting place to explore. In the east, near where I live, I have run the fire roads and followed animal trails to the top of Mount Wamban. I have camped by Oila Creek and climbed Mount Donovan by a long, snaking, and at times, rocky ridge above a deep valley gorge. I’ve traced the route of Burra and Coondella Creeks, visited the waterfalls of Diamond Creek and stood on the rocky summit of Burra Peak. And, I have tried to climb Mother Woila twice, and now, twice failed.
Two years ago, we had turned back from a ridge somewhere above Woila Creek below Euranbene Mountain, wet, cold, but most notably demoralised by the bush-bashing through intense bushfire regrowth. This time, we drove to Dampier Trig, the most common approach to Mother Woila, but found the bush-whacking worse than previous years. The waist high saplings now 3 metres high but still as tightly packed as blades of grass on a lawn. Giant tree trunks, with girths approaching my height, criss cross under the brush, forcing the walker to clamber over one after the other. There are boulders hidden in sedge grass and fern, twisting wiry branches from a thousand fallen tree tops, long strips of tough as cable bark that enraps the body as you attempt to pass. A good pace through this landscape is a kilometre per hour.
On a couple of brief occasions we stumble across a faint old fire trail, the bed as covered with saplings and regrowth as the rest of the landscape, but the foot bed slightly smoother, the upstart vegetation perhaps a half metre lower, but, over the course of the three kilometres to camp, we only manage to follow it for perhaps one or two hundred metres. One of our concerns, however, is ameliorated as we descend a short distance into a shallow valley and find a small pool of water and, for the first time since leaving the car, open ground upon which to erect a tent.
After tea, lunch and setting up camp, we decide to head towards a sharp point of land to the south, above some minor rock bands, but promising a good view to Woila, Tabletop, Scout Hat. This jutting promintory of land is known as Horseshoe Point. It is only 1.5 kilometres from camp, and a consolation because we know there is insufficient daylight for us to climb Mother Woila today.
Buried under three metre high saplings on largely flat ground with the sun low in the sky and almost invisible through layers and layers and layers of virulent regrowth, it is easy to lose your way so we refer constantly to the map on Doug’s phone to confirm our location. Doug reads off a bearing and I locate the direction with our compass, we press on for what seems a long time and a good distance before checking again. The time is long, the distance not. After an hour of or more of work, we reach the 1191 metre high point, which is thick with regrowth, we could be anywhere or nowhere. And suddenly, we just can’t be bothered. We can persist for perhaps another 15 minutes, before needing to turn back to avoid having to travel this terrain in the dark, something we are both loathe to do. Progress is difficult enough with daylight, and will be perilious by the light of a head torch. We turn around and thrash our way back to camp, repeating the map, bearing, compass procedure glad to return, in slightly quicker time to our clear camp spot, large fallen log, small pool of water. The density of the vegetation is like a weight, an oppressive burden carried along with our back packs, and only once we can see the sky again do we feel we can breathe deeply.
We leave too late the next day. It is almost 8 am by the time we set off from camp. First light is an hour earlier, we should have been up in the dark, off at first light, as we did just a few short years ago. The battle begins within 50 metres, map, compass bearing, struggle through the undergrowth, repeat. After an hour, we crest a high point and begin feeling our way down a ridge. Without such visibility obscuring vegetation, this ridge would be relatively easy to follow but buried under scrub, we wander off the ridge to the south and must force a way back onto it. Finally, after a couple of hours we are scrambling down blocky rocks, even these are not scrub free with wiry vegetation poking up. But, for the first time in over a day, we have a view.
The old mature trees on Mother Woila, perhaps a hundred metres above us now, have been torched by the fire, and the regrowth is a thick green fuzz. At this distance, that fuzz looks like nothing but we know it is actually two to three metres high, and dense as a fertilized lawn. We scramble part way down to the col, hesitating constantly, and this is the moment, the very minute of the decade, the month, the year, that I realise that I am old now, and I no longer have the desire to push on past any and all obstacles simply to stand atop another acme, in another place, where the view will be obscured by brush, and the climbing is unrewarding, marked only by grovelling up a loose gully between crumbling rock bands.
We find a seat on a rocky block, sheltered from the winter westerly wind, with weak sun filtering through the trees, and sit, looking out over the deep valleys and hills to the south, all of it burnt in the massive consumptive fires of 2020, marked as the landscape is by a characteristic grey shadow where the grand old trees have died from fire, and now the land is covered by the thick green carpet of saplings which might, one day, many decades, perhaps even a century from now, return to the old growth forest with massive trunked widely spaced eucalypts and open under story ferns, through which a traveller can walk with relative ease.
When finally we return home, after another slow walk back out from camp to our vehicle, I strike the three peaks of Mother Woila, Scout Hat and Table Top from my bucket list of trips. I won’t be going back. The white hot fire of youth has receded too far into the rear view mirror of my life to come back as a driving force to propel me to launch out a third time to try to ascend any of these peaks. The unremitting and unrewarding nature of the travel through the burnt out forest is simply no longer worth the effort. The scrub, an oppressive burden, three hours bumbling, stumbling, struggling travel for every one minute glimpse of mountain top or valley, just no longer worth the price of admission.
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