Deep Water Solo in the Desert

“Really Gavi, you should just leave and never come back.”

I’ve been to Mt. Arapiles twice now, a squat quartzite dome rising from the plains a few hours’ drive northwest of Melbourne, famed for fair weather year-round. Both times the place has greeted me with torrential rain and wind.

My first visit proves one of the biggest teases of my life, arriving in an area straight out of climbing lore with a gaggle of high school boys in tow. The Mount’s deep orange and brown rock rises in a maze of pillars and nooks and gullies from plains glowing gold with canola blossoms against an azure sky. Stubby-tailed lizards crouch beneath a world of lush green spring shrubbery, blossoms spraying the mountain’s surrounds in vibrant pink, white and violet. Deep green moss and flaky lichen blanket rocks, fed by runoff and seepage from spring storms. Rock wallabies blend into the bushes and kangaroos emerge in force by dusk to graze next to the bathrooms, whose walls bleed graffiti ranging from classic dirtbag vulgarity to downright hilarious.

Okay. I confess

No, happy to call it out

I LOVE YOU

You take me from down to up

From low to high

The colour of your skin:

            tanned and dark

Even the simple smell of your

            beautiful essence

Makes me claw for more

Your taste quickens my heart beat

Oh, dear coffee

I LOVE YOU!           

                            (~anon. dirtbag)

_____________________________________________________________________

We squeeze in a day and a half climbing on dry rock before weather moves in, radar glowing red, forcing a change in tactics. For the rest of our stay we turn to bouldering, playing on rock reminding me of Bishop’s Happies (read: pretty much the best jungle gym EVER), although with walls rising to glory behind us I’m told on good authority that bouldering at Arapiles is akin to masturbating in a brothel.

On rainy days we climb winding stone steps to the mount’s summit and gaze out over a landscape of quilted green and gold to the Grampians, thrusting upward behind bands of gray as storms advance across the plains. Our guide points out the classics, the cracks, the caves, access points, unclimbed walls, most-rescued routes and less-known tidbits of information as we return to camp.

Dinner operations shift to a sheltered area as the group’s Chinese and Indian boys give each other good-natured shit in equal parts (“Hey, go cook the noodles, that’s all you know how to do!” “Chickatarian, seriously what are you doing???”). At some point all 13 boys take it upon themselves to set headlamps on strobe mode, serenading camp to a rather novel mix of Biebs, Taylor Swift and Adele at the top of their lungs as pasta gurgles happily in our monster pot and rain pummels our tarps. To the dirtbag in the corner who borrowed my guitar and jammed out some serious tunes: I apologize.

__________

We spend our last days of program in the Grampians, playing cat and mouse with torrential rain. Some combination of good fortune and good will allows us to bunk in a shed owned by a local native flower farm, adjacent to a warehouse bursting with sprays of flowers, vats of dye and the amplified aroma of springtime in the bush.

Our guide, Simon, turns out to be “the guy who wrote the guidebooks,” a walking encyclopedia with a classically wry sense of humor, stoked to chat about current developments and routes he established, offering a wealth of knowledge and an easy window into the local climbing scene. It’s one of the things in my short experience I’ve found so remarkable about climbing in Australia in a smaller population: the legends seem so much an integral part of the community as a whole, happy to mix in with the local dirtbags on the daily.

We walk into the park through vibrant orange sand roads utterly demolished by the rain, continuing up over black slabs, past splotchy green and gray cliffs, and down around beneath a formidable, overhung black and orange-streaked expanse known as Taipan Wall. Our path swings up over slick slabs and drops to a cave nestled beneath Mt. Stapylton’s peak, where clouds and mist sock us in as we eat. Small pools rimmed in weather-worn rock frame our view, pointed undulating ridges seemingly transplanted to our present eerie world straight from a dinosaur’s back.

Our last day finds us winding up the walls’ front faces, exploring twisting chambers filled with pockets and whorls as we find our way to a rather famous, obscenely difficult boulder problem tucked into a long, low cave toward the top of the cliff called Wheel of Life. And because the problem never really rises more than a meter from the ground it’s easy for Simon to break out the camera to capture “photo proof” I can climb V15… in approach shoes and gaiters, obviously.

And yes, I promise we cleaned off the holds.

__________

I return to Arapiles two weeks later, outside work, theoretically for a highline festival. Thousands of low crimson flowers line the road as I step back into the world I left when I moved to Vietnam, returning— finally— to my safe place, of sorts: a community where life slows down and relationships grow fast and strong, built on a foundation of support, passion, trust and communication, literally holding each others’ lives in our hands on a daily basis.

It rains. A lot.

That red down right? Headed straight for our faces.

I sneak in a mellow, pressure-free morning climbing classics with my guide from a couple weeks prior, working my head around placing gear on new rock with new geometry. Wind whips over the mount and down through gullies as we climb, ripping tape from highlines in a screaming, oscillating roar ahead of the afternoon’s forecasted storm as I set anchors at the top of the day’s final pitch.

Back at camp in The Pines, just in time for the rain to arrive, we construct a runoff diversion trench through our monster cook tent. Affectionately referred to as the Panama Canal, we seriously contemplate holding paper boat races on the waterway as torrential rain fills the ditch to brimming. Bridges and banter centered on water privatization may have also made cameo appearances.

Lamb and barley stew finishes cooking over the campfire and finds its way into our modgepodge mix of pots and bowls as lightning clears the sky behind the mount, thunder rolling and reverberating though the earth. Sometime later as the rain begins to ebb a borrowed guitar appears, someone breaks out the world’s most appropriate song for our current predicament, and a dozen people bring Kurt Cobain to life around the fire:

Where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines

I shivered the whole night through…

Despite tempermental weather, the next few days are filled with good people, good music, and the comfort of shared mindset. It’s taken a solid day for my body to remember how to settle into a slower life again, without worry of paperwork and student oversight and things to do and days to come.

We connect.

Technology takes a back seat to human interaction as we lose access to power outlets and sun.

We teach each other, share perspectives and support each other. Not because we’re paid to do so, but simply because we share passions and find fulfillment from each others’ triumphs, helping each other learn and overcome challenges.

We play amongst camp’s slackline jungle gym. We drink unearthly fresh-brewed ginger beer and eat our way through monster pots of veggie curry. We break out guitars and ukuleles and pvc flutes around the campfire and simply forget the clouds as they lay blankets of mist upon us into the night.

I climb one of the classics, a chimney called Agamemnon, with a rad new friend and coworker who’s spent the better part of his climbing career at Arapiles.

We’re told it should be dry.

It’s not dry.

The guidebook advises we “step across the void and stem to glory.” I’m sure it would be glorious on a sunny day, without water raining down on our belays. Without sheets of water running down the walls as we rely on friction to move upward. Somehow, I realize at the top, my scariest pitches are never the hardest ones.

We reconnect. 

I find myself camping next to a friend from the states, first met in Chiang Mai. Another familiar face, and totally inspirational athlete, has flown in from home as well.  

In some bizarre fashion, several days of chance conversation about projects and dreams and plans with a new companion lead to a realization that the borrowed van I’ve been loitering next to all week belongs to a crazy badass mutual friend from my summers in Squamish, who happens to be working this term in a little town in the boonies less than an hour from where I’m based.

And at the end of the week I wrench myself away from Arapiles once again, hopping into a truck headed toward Melbourne. I belatedly realize the bus I’m counting on doesn’t actually exist on Sundays (blonde moment #4 and counting), miss two trains, just barely make a third to a little town where a friend waits and catch a final ride up through the winding, sunspattered Black Spur, back into the “real” world.

August Winter Down Under

So I’ve been AWOL… for a good solid three months or so. Oops. 

So much has happened in that time I know I won’t actually sit down to write about it all in detail but the gist goes as follows…

I spent a brisk, sunny week in Sydney, standing proud in the world’s largest natural harbor and within sight of the Blue Mountains, so named for the haze created by eucalyptus’ natural oil. I stayed a short walk from downtown with a climbing friend of a friend from Vietnam, in an old, slender, artsy house that reminded me of home. I spent days walking through central Sydney: past the naval yards, through ritzy historic wharfs, past super schmancy fleets of sailboats, amongst the botanical gardens, past the opera house and up onto the Harbour Bridge. I wandered through historic colonial neighborhoods into the CBD, exploring buildings brimming with filigree and tile and landmark towers and marble fountains throwing up rainbows in front of imposing orange cathedrals. I walked the Anzac Bridge’s pyramidal cable span and dropped into Darling Harbor, looking down on submarines and warships housed in the city’s naval museum (and the fanciest public bathrooms I’ve ever seen). I met with friends at Sydney University and wandered an ivy-blanketed castle-type building that really, truly, should belong in Hogwarts.

I spent an afternoon and evening with family friends reaching back to WWII: an unlikely connection originating– from what I understand– between a Jewish American intelligence officer and his German informant that has somehow endured through future generations 70 years later and half way around the world.

I rode a ferry west into Sydney Harbor, following the Parramatta River past the Olympic Stadium, under slender bridges and into narrow waters where mangroves encroached on boat lanes marked by painted, battered pylons.

I found myself a proper smoked salmon sandwich to munch on as I walked Manly Beach’s broad expanse under the sun, watching surfers in their natural habitat before becoming hopelessly lost in the scrub as I made my way up past a castle-like international university to the North Heads. I watched whales surface and spout across from the city’s skyline just outside the harbor’s mouth, lined by rugged cliffs and churning water.

I just barely managed to catch up with an old friend from martial arts, huddling around her space heater as we compared Australia’s lack of insulation (Sydney doesn't do heat or insulation) and our visa and injury woes… and realized our relationship’s change from that of instructor and pesky teenager to friends on equal footing.

I spent a beautiful day and night in the Blue Mountains huddled around a woodstove, waking to my first snow since 2014 dusted onto firewood in the back yard and climbing sandstone cracks for the first time in my life, then headed straight back with a new travel buddy as we embarked on a three-day road trip south toward Melbourne. We stopped into famous overlooks and explored further off the trodden path, laying flat on cliff edges to eye seasonal waterfalls dotting sheer, deep orange canyons blanketed by eucalyptus spread before us.

We drove through apple orchards, past farm stands and roadside national crests constructed of rusted cars. We slept a night on a country knoll, waking above of a world of cloud just in time for the sun to break over frosty orchards and fields of boulders and sheep. We visited a country dairy farm where I made friends with the resident grizzled dog. We ate lunch on a riverside and watched old steamboats come in for the evening. We traveled for hours in the dark on unsealed roads and Taner taught me tips and tricks to safe driving around kangaroos at night: “Really, they’re all just unpredictable little shits.”

I moved to a place called Eildon, a tiny town on the edge of a massive lake surrounded by rolling hills about two hours northeast of Melbourne, to start working for the Outdoor Education Group. I showed up to frigid, damp, PNW-style bone-penetrating cold and dozens of kangaroos (with babies!!) chowing down on the daily outside my kitchen window. I pulled a SERIOUS blonde moment when, for the first two days of my residence, I didn’t register the AC unit could also spew heat into the room and huddled miserably in multiple sleeping bags (for the record: I’d just come from over a year in the tropics after growing up on a woodstove and central heating).

… I may or may not have have also inadvertently locked myself out of the house five minutes before my first day of work. Without my shoes. (My boss was nice about it.)

I did around six weeks of training for work and learned lots of things I probably should have picked up years ago: I can now drive a stick shift, drive with a trailer (but it’s not pretty), carry out basic bicycle repair, drive on the left side of the road, assess tricksy murderous Australian trees for camping safety, and paddle a canoe solo in a straight line. I saw a platypus!!! I learned a few more nifty knots while I did my rappel assessment in them midst of a glorious snowstorm, and taught just a few Australians snowballs can be more economically constructed by collecting snow from picnic tables rather than grass. (For the record, guys, that “blanket” of snow you see on the ground is in fact a light dusting.)

I gambled on the weather and lost, climbing into the clouds on sopping sandstone and casting my rappel rope to descend into a cloudy abyss, convincing myself I was high in the mountains at home.

I made it home to the states for the busiest seven days of my life: I saw a few of my best friends, introduced my oldest friend to Venice Beach (got ultra sunburned) and went to a Dodgers’ game (read: ate neon blue popcorn, cheered for flying babies and watched no fewer than three police evictions). I picked summer blackberries with my adoptive grandma, (accidentally) drove on the wrong side of the road, caught up with old horses and met new ones (with super cool tricks!). I basked in the glory of tall, dark, dense sun-dappled forests full of cedars and firs. I dropped into favorite old haunts for classic Portlandian food and geeked out over new gear in my favorite gear shops. I watched the most mindblowing Perseid meteor shower I’ve ever seen from the top of a fire truck in the countryside. I spent an afternoon wandering the Mission with my aunt in San Francisco. And in my lifelong adoptive family, I watched the first cousin of my generation marry an incredible man in one of my favorite places in the world.

I drank a LOT of coffee.

I landed in back in Australia with blisters from wedding heels to one last week of training in the mountains southwest of Sydney. I saw my first echidna, an oversized hedgehog half-buried and clutching for dear life onto tree roots in the dirt. I saw dozens of wombats: pretty much a cross between a teddy bear, a bison and a gopher, and one of the goddam cutest animals I’ve ever seen… except they dig lots of burrows in lawns (and unlike moles, their holes are actually large enough to take a fall into and seriously wreck yourself).

This winter has been hectic as all getup, dogged by injuries, visas (combined Australian and Vietnamese bureaucracy, anyone?), and various other insecurities and uncertainties. But: I’ve also met some super, super cool people. Cool and smart and rad and welcoming enough that I’m actually slightly intimidated by a quite a few of them. I’m in a steady, likeminded, community for the first time in a long time, living for the first time in my life in a house with folks I’m stoked to be around and highly respect rather than people I’m simply able to coexist with in the same building. It all makes So. Much. Difference.

Here’s to the next ten months…