Australia Adventures 2010

An adventure Down Under!

April 5th 2010

I am here in Australia with Matt Segal, James Pearson, Cedar Wright and videographer Rob Frost.

Our trip thus far has been fast and furious. Greeted in Tasmania with a beautiful sunny evening and a good weather forecast, we were forced into high gear. Our first morning we met up with our local contact Tony McKenny, who proceeded to describe the area that we were about to go explore, telling us epic horror stories of loose rocks, huge approaches, no potable water, great white sharks and gale force winds. He loaded us up with maps and info and told us not to contact him if anything epic (which he deemed likely) happened to one or more of our group. After leaving Tony, with stories of epic disasters floating about in our heads, we raced off to jump on a boat with Tasmanian Island Tours, and headed off on a scouting tour of the coastline.

Our boat tour proved to be spectacular, with what the boat captain explained “today is one of the top five best weather and sea days of the year”. Miles of amazingly stunning coastline with sea cliffs, sea stacks, seals, sea birds and aqua marine blue water. Rounding a bend in the coastline we could see the amazing finger like spires of the Trident rising from the ocean, all of which have been climbed but the most seaward spire. The gang started getting psyched. Everyone agreed that these spires would be a worthy tick, a good objective before the big stuff and really we didn’t think looked too bad.

The boat ride then took us to view our main objective, which is the Chasm on Cape Pillar. These 300-meter towering walls rise from the sea with such magnificence that it will drop the jaw of even the most traveled climbers. We scouted lines and got psyched and discussed how really. “the rock doesn’t look as horrifying as Tony had described”. With these beautiful walls in mind and the sunny calm day at hand, we made plans to hike out the next day and talked of conquering this big wall as well as the Trident and possibly climbing some more walls as well if we still had time and good weather.

After the boat ride we stocked our supplies, packed our bags and got a fitful get-lagged nights sleep. Next morning, day three, we headed off on the Tasman Peninsula trail headed toward Cape Pillar. Hefting our monstrous packs full of ropes, racks, camping gear, food for 6 days and lots of camera gear we trudged down the trail. Our massive loads making the ten-mile hike seem to be at least double that, we arrived just at dusk to our bivy, which has no water. Super worked, Matt, James, Rob and I unloaded our packs and headed back to the closest creek, which is about a half hour away and carted back giant loads of water.

Day four in Tasmania and we woke up to partly cloudy skies and light winds. Exuasted from our previous day of load carrying but still psyched, we racked up slowly and headed out to tick off the Trident. After an hour of easy walking we began our descent towards the spires, down dense trees and undergrowth on near vertical terrain. Plants and stiff sharp branches clawing at us as we made our way down the slope. After about five hundred feet of some the worst burly bush whacking that we had ever seen, we came to what has been described as “The chunderous pile of mank that guards the approach”. Cedar led the way stepping out onto a giant refrigerator sized block that proceeded to give way and trundle 300 feet to the ocean. Fortunately Cedar was holding onto a good hold. The stories of “mashed fingers, broken toes, and a brand new kern mantle rope chopped in two by various runaway lumps of dolerite” by the previous ascent team, all seeming a bit more real than we initially thought. We proceeded cautiously and came to a deciding point. More knarley mank ahead, we decided that it was not worth it to take the entire group across a death traverse and tucked our tails and headed back. Clawing our way back out over rotten trees and loose blocks we made it back to the rim. No mishaps thus far, just scraped up and bruised both in and out, we count ourselves lucky at this point even though our initial objective thwarting our attempts. Our next plan…head to the main wall of the Chasm.



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