Bright Air - Barry Maitland [44]
As we got back into the car with our loot, Anna said, ‘What is a phasmid, anyway?’
‘I have no idea.’
10
After the Watagans I went on a number of weekend climbing trips with Luce and her friends around the Sydney area. I was still doing the bouldering and gym work, and was gradually becoming more proficient and more confident with heights. Then, towards the end of the year, we decided to take a climbing trip to Tasmania as soon as exams were finished. I think Marcus had something to do with the decision, because he had some business to do there at the University of Tasmania. So we made arrangements to fly to Hobart, and hire a van to drive out to the Franklin–Gordon Wild Rivers National Park in western Tasmania. Our goal was Frenchmans Cap.
Just getting there was quite an effort—a two-day hike from the Queenstown road, where we had left Marcus and the van to return to his meetings in Hobart. We hauled our thirty-kilogram packs over the Franklin Hills, from which we should have got our first distant view of Frenchmans Cap, but were disappointed to find the whole horizon obscured by low cloud. This was a wet part of the world, where rain falls three hundred days in the year, and we knew that our climbing would depend on getting a spell of decent weather. We descended to the plain of the Loddon River, a notorious bog of button grass, ponds and mud, as Curtis discovered when he stepped off the trail and sank to his waist. A fine drizzle set in as we plodded through the marshland, and we no longer said much. After crossing over the pass on the far side and descending to the hut on Lake Vera, we’d been going for over ten hours and were exhausted. We were the only people at the hut that night, and after a hot meal and change of clothes we fell fast asleep.
The rain was heavier the next morning, uncomfortably so at first, then more alarmingly as the track led along an exposed ridge and the wind picked up, lashing us as we laboured under our heavy packs. At one point Anna lurched against me, blown sideways by the stinging wind, and I had to catch and steady her to stop her falling down the scree slope. Again we should have had a sighting of Frenchmans Cap from there, but could see nothing until we approached the Tahune hut, almost at its base, when the peak suddenly loomed out of the cloud, huge and scary. I had been told that these were the highest cliffs in Australia, four hundred metres of sheer white quartzite, but the immensity of the climb hadn’t hit me until then, and I felt queasy all that evening, guiltily hoping that the rain would keep falling.
But it didn’t. The next morning was cloudy but dry, becoming brighter as the day went on. We decided to limber up on some of the shorter routes on the north-west wall, an array of pinnacles and buttresses on the lower side of the mountain. I was paired with Luce, and after a slightly shaky start I began to get a feel for the hard, crystalline rock surface, and gain a little confidence.
The skies kept clearing until by evening there wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and the others decided that the following day would probably offer the best chance to attack the long routes on the high cliffs on the other side of Frenchmans Cap, which would need a whole day’s climbing. There was a lot of debate over maps and diagrams about which route we should try, and in the end we decided to go for the east face. They selected three parallel routes, just as at the Watagans, except that now the climbs would be three hundred and eighty metres long instead of twenty. Luce and I would take the middle one, rated 20 on the Australian scale, 5.10d on the American, and much tougher and longer than anything I’d attempted before.
We set off early the next morning for the hour’s hike to the base of the east face, then we split up into our pairs. Luce and I climbed to the top of a grassy