There's A Goanna Up There

Years ago, we were on a climbing trip in Washington’s Cascade Mountains and were mostly rock climbing out of Icicle Creek Canyon. A windy dirt road follows Icicle Creek west from the nearby town of Leavenworth. Leavenworth is one of those weird tourist towns that are built to be something else. Bavarian towns that aren’t in Germany seem popular. Leavenworth is a Bavarian town while British Columbia in Canada has it’s own “Little Bavaria” in Kimberley near the Purcell Mountains. Going to some place that pretends to be some other place but actually isn’t has always seemed odd to me. Like going to Disney Land to visit an artificial forest when you could go to a real forest, or the “pyramids” on the Las Vegas strip. Both towns, however, are popular. Of course, we avoided Leavenworth and the whole Bavarian scene as if it was infected by plague, camping instead at one of the rustic campgrounds by the Icicle River.

Ridge walking in the Washington Cascades

Anyway, we had spent too much time in a somewhat frustrating search for a crag called the Pearly Gates which is situated some 300 or 400 vertical metres above Icicle Creek and accessed by, what was in those days, a somewhat scrappy climbers track. The only guidebook available then was poorly written and directions to the crags were given in miles from a certain point along Icicle Creek Road but, if you had car with distance in kilometres, this always required a conversion to miles and if you were not at the exact right spot to start your odometer – say for instance you were camped part way up Icicle Creek – it was well nigh impossible to work out where the crag was located.

Morning by an icy river

Our notes from the trip indicate that we had to cross four separate branches of Snow Creek on logs to get onto the climbers trail and given this was early spring, the creeks were running fast and high with snow melt. Nevertheless, we finally made it to the climbing area. The first route we climbed had a psychotic mountain goat guarding the exit from the slab climb onto the belay ledge. Doug spent a good deal of time standing on tiny holds on a granite slab after leading a somewhat poorly protected route trying to gain access to the belay ledge past the goat which went back and forth not only across the ledge but up and down the slab in an agitated manner. If my recollection is anywhere near correct, Doug finally sidled past the goat to the anchor when he realized that if he stayed on the slab any longer he would simply grease right off.

Goats in the Cascade Mountains

This modest debacle was compounded when we realised our rope was not long enough to abseil off so we had to traverse exposed terrain to try to find another anchor from which our rope still did not reach the ground so we ended up traversing back to the original anchor again. All of this traversing was on a greasy ledge in rock shoes above a 30 metre cliff. We then had the bright idea of Doug lowering me to the ground on a single strand of rope, thinking that rope stretch might mean we could actually reach the ground. I got my tip-toes on the ground just as the halfway mark on our rope slid through Doug’s belay device, so we figured it was a go and with good knots in both ends of the rope, Doug abseiled to the ground.

Coming Down

I don’t remember much more about climbing at that particular crag but I suspect most of it was pretty ordinary. But what has all this to do with goannas? Well, climbing today, Doug was leading up a final slab to the anchor when he encountered a large goanna flat out on the rock in the sun. Goannas have frightfully long and sharp claws, talons really, and when agitated or disturbed they puff themselves up to look bigger than they are – although a really large goanna often seems as big as a small crocodile anyway – and hiss menacingly. Given that goannas are a predatory animal, it’s wise to treat them with a degree of respect. Although rare, there have been goanna attacks.

Those Talons

After standing about on the slab for about five minutes engaged in a staring contest with the goanna, the reptile finally decided it might sunbake somewhere else just as comfortably and it ambled away. That’s the thing with outdoor sports, something interesting is always just about to happen.

An Unexpected Wind

From our home bay down to Burrewarra Point with a very light headwind, under 10 knots. At Burrewarra Point, my watch ticked over 11 kilometres so if we turned around that would be at least half marathon distance. The wind was ticking up, and ticking up, and ticking up, and by the time we passed Jimmies Island, the 10 to 15 knot southeasterly was generating some nice wind waves so off we went catching runners all the way back to our home bay.

PC: DB

Training Concepts: The Taps Edition

The Enormocast, the original climbing podcast hosted by Chris Kalous, occasionally features an episode called “Taps” which, as you might guess, is all about the sundown of climbing trends. Here, I suggest the Taps Edition of training concepts which should be abandoned forthwith.

The idea for this issue of the blog came from this podcast which features the words “intuitive,” “holistic,” and “balanced” so many times that one begins to think holistic, intuitive and balanced training is a new religion. Speaking of religion, I am reminded of one of the many critiques of George W. Bush that surfaced during and after his presidency, and that was the number of times GW referred to God in his speeches. Anyone who is not a believer becomes uncomfortable when listening to the devout – be it to the religion of training or Christianity – engaging in over-use of certain words and concepts.

• Holistic: Due to overuse, this term should be retired from everyone’s vocabulary. It is meaningless jargon and simply informs the reader/listener that you have not had an original thought in decades.
• Intuitive: See “holistic” above. Another meaningless term. Intuition is all things to all people from “I think I’ll lie on the couch, binge watch Game of Thrones and eat Tim Tams all day” to “I’m really good at running, ergo I’ll go for a run.” Should be replaced with consistency, reasonableness and occasional over-reach.
• One Rep Max: Unless you are a power-lifter or olympic lifter and competing on an actual platform in front of an real life judge and audience, you have no method of determining your one rep max and no business trying. This concept becomes especially ludicrous when trainers prescribe such things as a total of 24 reps at 90% of your one rep max (happened in podcast linked above). If 100 pounds is your one rep max in what universe is that same person lifting 90 pounds 24 times in a row?
• Any talk of acidic versus alkalinic internal biologic environments. This is firmly the land of pseudoscience. The human body is driven to homeostasis, whether that be blood sugar levels or pH balance. Simply put, any condition which results in a disturbed acid-base balance over time is associated with death.
• Balanced training: see points 1 and 2 above. A healthy and functional human being should not require nine hours of sleep every single day in a dark room of a certain temperature with zero ambient noise, nor the exact balance of nutrients, special salt water drinks in the morning accompanied by clover leaf teas in the afternoon, or pockets full of EMF Grounding Rocks. We should all be resilient enough to go balls to the wall sometimes after a bad nights sleep and dinner of pizza and beers.

Here is the week in review: seven days mobility work, three days strength, three days core training, two days on the climbing wall, one day actually climbing – yay, 42 kilometres and 1300 metres gain on foot, and a sad 14 kilometres of paddling with an extra day rolling the kayak.

My Everlasting Trousers

Paddle trips with FishKiller always, at some point, devolve into the “diet wars.” Not the vegan/vegetarian diet wars, but the SAD (standard Australian diet) versus meat and vegetables diet wars. I have been on plenty of trips with vegetarians/vegans who, almost universally, wrinkle up their noses and give you those perjorative looks – half the population excels at these, you guess which half - when I cook bacon in the morning. I always wonder, as do all bacon eaters among us, if the nose wrinklers are secretly wishing they were eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. We’ll never know.

Mike cooking eggs on a beach

FishKiller, for some reason known only to himself, takes a large tub, we are talking three kilograms in size, of ground up Weetabixmixed with protein powder on kayak trips. He eats this for breakfast. I have no first hand knowledge of this, but the resultant mixture looks like it would come out in a similar consistency to that in which it goes in. I’m not sure, given Weetabix turns to some kind of runny slop when you add any liquid, why it needs to be ground up, but I think it is a space issue.

Bacon AND eggs

On our recent Capricornia trip, I said something along the lines of “people would be healthy if they just ate meat, eggs and vegetables.” This is, of course, with some minor variations (the addition of fermented foods) along the lines of the Western A Price nutrition guidelines, and, realistically, close to the modern equivalent of our evolutionary diet. Today, evolutionary biologists endorse the theory that humans got big brains from eating meat. I could use this as a reason to keep eating meat, but the truth is more complicated: I like meat, I am 60 years old and need a lot of protein to overcome anabolic resistance, the only alternative calorie source realistically are carbohydrates and older people tend towards insulin resistance/carbohydrate intolerance. On a more basic level, moderate to high carbohydrate diets make me feel like crap and interfere with my recovery, so I eat meat.

Everlasting Trousers

On the first of September, a few days after we got home from our Capricornia paddle trip, I decided I would eat a version of the carnivore diet for all of September. The carnivore diet is what it sounds like: lots of meat. However, as with any human endeavour, there are many variations. I chose my own variation which was all kinds of animal flesh, eggs, one serving of high protein low fat Greek yoghurt once a day, with vegetables only eaten with dinner, and dinner almost universally included potatoes. Here’s my reasoning: I’ve been really low carbohydrate before (under 20 grams a day) and I felt a bit floppy on that level of carbohydrate. I’m pretty active so one serving of potatoes a day is a pretty modest amount of carbohydrate.

The Pie Eating Days

Well, it worked so well that I’m pretty much following the same plan into October. I lost 4 kilograms but no muscle, my waist and hips shrunk so that I can now fit into trousers that I wore in my late 20’s. Literally, the exact trousers – a pair of climbing pants that just never wear out! My blood pressure dropped about 20 points, and I saved a heap of time cooking because all I have to do is make sure I have some left over animal protein from dinner and the next days cooking chores are done until that evenings dinner preparation. My energy is good: I ran 20 kilometres on Monday without any nutrition except my morning coffee (non-negotiable) and I seem to be recovering well from a heavy training load.

From The Heart

A northeasterly swell is rolling into our local beach but the sea itself is almost oily calm, and the air, even at 8 am, hot, still, suffocatingly heavy feeling under a dull metal sky. We’ve come out early to paddle west into Batemans Bay as far as the new cement bridge over the Clyde River. Strong winds are forecast, along with a rising swell – four metres off-shore if the forecasts are correct – thunderstorms, damaging winds, a large and powerful swell. The only warning the Bureau of Meteorology has not issued is for boils, plagues, and pestilence. Although, since the strong westerlies the flies are approaching pestilence levels.

The last couple of days have felt eerily like 2019 when the entire east coast of Australia burned. A lot of people are on edge. People who lost homes, or had friends and acquaintances lose homes, people who fled the coastal communities in the middle of the busy summer school holiday season. I remember waking up on New Years Eve and walking out into the back yard which, at 6 am was like walking into a furnace. Hot, dry air driven by strong westerly winds, flecks of ash in the air, the smoke chokingly thick, and a pall of red-brown cloud spreading across the sky from the west.

All through that summer we had the house closed up as the air was so putrid with smoke from the fires that it was better to suffer the claustrophic heat in the house rather than breathe the air. This led to a strange dissociation with what was happening outside and what we experienced indoors. We did, however, listen with a mixture of equal incredulity and horror, as the mayor of Eurobodalla (since voted out) encouraged holiday makers to keep coming to our seaside towns and villages.

At that time, the Currowan fire had only to jump the Clyde River – barely a couple of hundred metres wide in some parts - to enable the fire front to march inexorably, like a conquering army, through the state forests and national parks that border the thin strip of populated coastline. This avaricious desire to bring tourist dollars to the community without regard for potential catastrophe cemented in my psyche the belief that we are governed by idiots. Nothing since that time has altered my opinion.

I remember, a few days before New Years Eve, walking down to our local bay, past the caravan park where families had come to camp in tents and trailers. The air was brown with smoke and you could barely see across the bay. A young woman pushed a baby in a stroller, still one of my most prophetic memories of the entire summer. She could have been in Iraq in the middle of the first Gulf war.

Early morning New Years Eve we walked out into the yard and knew that the time had come to pack anything we wanted to save from the fire and prepare to leave town. Our friend Mike, who had some of his kayaks stored in our yard, came down from Nelligen, and we checked things over, made sure we had done what we could, got ready to leave. Doug and I hooked up the caravan, loaded with only those irreplaceable mementos of which a life is remembered – mostly photos and slides – put the kayaks on the roof, the paddling gear in the car.

My memory about what happened next is confused. The wind was so strong, the sky so dark with smoke, the air acrid. Maybe we heard an explosion, maybe we saw flames, I don’t remember, but I do remember, we got in the car and began to drive towards the evacuation centre. Predictably, there was a traffic jam. Mike, after years in the fire service said “I’m not getting incinerated in a line of cars,” so we parked by Caseys Beach, a scant five minutes from our house, and unloaded the boats from the cars onto the beach. The sky to the west was black, smoke billowed, people were everywhere, some were calm and complacent, others panicked. I remember one bloke telling me “The fire will never come down to the beach,” and yet, the next day we would hear that Rosedale, a small community with houses right on the beach, had been devastated. Houses within metres of the sand raised to the ground, horses, dogs, people, all sheltering in the water as the wind blew, the fire front leapt, terror reigned.

We decided we would paddle out into the Bay, the caravan might burn, the car might burn, but we would survive. We launched the boats into the windiest conditions I’ve ever paddled in. Our goal was to get to Snapper Island. We would be far enough off-shore to shelter, but not so far as to become a victim of the 40 knot off-shore winds. On our first attempt we made it only as far a tiny bit of sand uncovered by the tide below Observation Point. It was so windy we could not make any progress. If we could not make Snapper Island, perhaps we could paddle west around Observation Point to Corrigans Beach and the evacuation centre.

With a struggle, we got to Observation Point but flames were leaping up along the shore at Corrigans Beach, was the evacuation centre on fire? We pointed the boats to Snapper Island, only half a kilometre away. This time we made it, pulling up in the lee of the island on the eastern side. We sat in our boats as close as we dared to the rocks, waiting for the wind to change. On either side of our resting place we could see wind waves built almost to the height of an ocean swell streaming east.

A tiny bird landed on my open palm. It felt feather light, insubstantial as a piece of ash itself. I could see it’s heart pounding in its chest, it’s beak held open, seemingly gasping for air. I sat as still as I could, willing this small but precious piece of life to hang on, not give up, not die in this piece of paradise become war zone that I called home. All around was noise and wind and confusion. Airplanes and helicopters flew overhead, sirens wailed, the sound of explosions – I never found out what they were – and, overlaying the sound of busy humanity, the wind, roaring and pulsing, a rabid beast hungry to devour anything, everything. The sky went completely dark. The aircraft stopped, there was no visibility to fly, the sirens stopped, the bird fluttered away, and the wind changed, roaring up the south coast, and of a sudden, we were in danger from another quadrant, the southerly wind.

Paddling around to the north, we landed on Snapper Island. Snapper Island is a wildlife refuge, little penguins live there and, under normal conditions, I would never set foot on the island. Humans have trod far enough, there should be some places where we do not go, but, on New Years Eve 2019, when we wondered if our lives would be irrevocably altered, we landed on the island.

It was near 6:00 pm when we left the island. The southerly wind saved so many houses that day even as the westerly wind had destroyed so many. The north side of Batemans Bay, where residents had felt under seige for months was spared. The beautiful forests of Murramarang National Park where the spotted gums grow tall and spread wide, and burrawangs fill in the understory escaped the fires as far north as Durras. Beyond Durras, the fire had already burnt over Point Upright and north up the coast. Months later, we would visit favorite areas of the coast, Snake Bay, Clear Point, the rocky headlands, the sand beaches, all burnt. I wept many times. The forest, the land, the animals, this place to which I felt such a connection, a spiritual connection not unique to Aboriginals but felt by all Australians who love this land, gone, all gone, in a summer of drought, thunder, lightening, fires starting and spreading, a summer of madness.

With a bucket of vegetables I would go out, as did many local people, up to the forests charred and desolate, and scatter sweet potato, carrots, greens, along with buckets of water in the hope that any animals that had survived might survive a bit longer, until the rains came and the land greened again. But the sticks, the trunks, the stems left standing were quiet, too quiet. No screech of cocky, no scratching of lyre bird, no thump of macropod. Only silence and the sound of weeping.

One day, early in 2020, our south coast squad paddled north from Mossy Point, past the burnt out silhouette of Burrewarra Point and north along Rosedale Beach, McKenzies Beach, Malua Bay. Burnt out houses, black soot on the water, floating debris washed down the river after the fires, the smell of burning still in the air, or maybe just in our nostrils forever. We stopped for lunch at Guerilla Bay. Everyone was shell-shocked. Everyone had a story. Some had lost houses, others outbuildings, all of us our innocence. In the aftermath we knew that life can never be fully safe, that we should hold all of our friends and even our enemies close to our hearts for we are all one under the burning sun of an Australian summer sky. Black fella, white fella, we all feel a connection to the land, the animals, the spirit of this country we call home. We are more alike than different. Vote with your heart.

Rolling in Fire Weather

You know it’s windy when your kayak nearly gets blown out of your hand trolleying down to the beach. And, it’s hot. Bushfire weather: hot and windy. It’s the time of year when you check Fires Near Me daily, or even hourly. You feel glad when there is no fire near you, and horrified that you can feel any positive emotion when you know that somewhere, not that far away, someone else is in danger. Rain is already falling in Victoria, and, if we are lucky, we’ll get rain tomorrow too.

Too windy to paddle, but good and hot for our first day of the 2023 season rolling the kayaks.  Short video here. 

Build It And They Will Come: Maloneys Beach to Richmond Beach

I’m pretty sure someone said “build it and they will come” before Kevin Costner made the quote famous in Field of Dreams – a movie I have never seen – but the philosophy has certainly worked for the Murramarang South Coast walk. I think I must have passed 20 people between Richmond Beach and Maloneys Beach this morning. There were a couple of folk just strolling but most were weighed down with backpacks and obviously finishing up the walk.

Initially, I thought I would go from Maloneys Beach to Durras and back, a distance that was about 8 kilometres before the new track went in, but on the new track it is 8 kilometres to Oakey Beach, and probably 15 kilometres (maybe more?) to Durras. I’m not in shape enough to run 30 kilometres, so I went for 20 km instead, up to Richmond Beach and back.

The things you think of after you finish… if I had gone another half a kilometre in either direction that would have been 21 kilometres and a half marathon! Who really cares, apart from the prodigious amount of flies, it was a nice morning out doing one of the things I really enjoy, running bush tracks by myself.