fatvegan

Dad, Wayne, Neil, Simon and I went down Danae Brook Canyon on Monday 18th December. It was probably the toughest day of my life. I probably should have trained up a bit for it. Maybe 25 is the age where you really have to start doing that stuff.

We had to start at 6am (though we didn't start walking til 6:30am), so we were up at 5am. We camped the night at a sweet little spot that Wayne had found.

Finding the canyon was pretty easy. A cairn marked the point to leave the 4WD track and there was a track of sorts that was fairly easy to follow. We got to the first abseil at about 8:30am.

The first abseil was easy. Good anchor point. Quite long but you could probably climb down without a rope if you needed to. We were all pretty nervous so it was good to have something like that to start off with.

I was using a double-piton bar and we had a 9mm rope. Not a good combination. Only the longer free-fall drops my hand wasn't strong enough to control the descent. I did it for the first two abseils but my hand started to cramp so I shared dad's rack from that point on. Neil and Simon had figure-eights but I think the racks are the best.

The second abseil was long but straight forward too. Couple of slippery parts but nothing to tricky.

The third abseil was a bit tricky. Having stolen dad's rack I went down first. The book tells everyone but the last person to abseil on the outside of a large chockstone about half way down the drop. Getting onto (and over) the chockstone is tricky and there is the possibility that the rope will jam. If it jammed it would make it hard for the next people to come down. And the last person would have to unjam it and go down the inside anyway. So I decided to go down the inside of the chockstone. Unfortunately the rope went on the outside and I got jammed. I spent a fairly hairy 10 minutes hanging 15 metres above the ground trying to unjam the rope so I could keep going down. I was a couple of metres below the chockstone and didn't have prussick loops so I couldn't climb back onto the chockstone to unjam the rope. The other guys couldn't see me but I yelled out for them to set up the backup rope. Eventually - just as Wayne was coming down the next rope - I was able to flick one of the strands out of the crevice. I used it to pull the other strand out of the jam. I'd tied off my belay device so I was secured and that had freaked me out a bit. But untying it was worse. I was worried after I'd undone the knots I'd be left holding onto the wrong piece of rope. Luckily I was able to wedge myself against by walls of the tunnel I was in so I didn't have weight on the rope anyway. After that it was all good. We all came down pretty easily.

We had a bit of a scare when the rope jammed while we were pulling it down. But we all jumped on it at the same time and it came tumbling down with us.

The fourth abseil was a winner. Free fall through the middle of a waterfall for 30 metres.

There were a few more abseils which we were expecting to be tricky. But none of them were particularly tricky. In fact they were some of the easier abseils I've done, apart from the height. Which was high.

There was, however, an extremely tricky walk once we'd finished the abseils. We had to clamber down through some recent-looking rock-falls for about an hour, and it was hard work. The first part of it was pretty dangerous too. Much more dangerous than any of the abseils we'd had to do. Then there was a nice stroll for another hour through the river-bed. Although by that point we were starting to worry about light, and our legs were starting to die, so it wasn't as pleasant as it might have been.

It was only when we got to the bottom of the creek that the hard work really started. We had two hours of light and a surly 600m slope to climb. Normally 600m wouldn't fuss me that much, but we were already knackered and we had to carry water up in case we had to camp the night on the track. So it was an extremely tough hour and a half up this hill. Our legs started to cramp up. My achilles started to hurt. For the second time in 15 years I started to feeling asthma coming on.

I think it was the asthma that really got to me actually. I remembered my last (and only serious) attack at the beginning of the year on a walk with Libby. That walk was a total cruise the attack left me lying in the middle of the track for an hour or so until I recovered. We didn't really have the luxury of stopping on Danae and I was freaking out that I'd spend the night sleeping where I dropped.

Eventually, and it seemed rather magically, we arrived at the top and popped out onto the main walking track without a fuss. From there on we simply had to stuff our faces with nuts and jelly beans and chocolate to make ourselves keep walking. Leg cramps made certain movements almost in possible, so much of my rock-climbing was really creative falling mixed in with some odd sorts of levering.

When we got to the end we were pretty tired. It was 9:30pm, about 30 minutes after dark. The day had been about 15 hours of fairly solid activity. We went back to the camp site and had a beer. I'd been craving it all day, but I was too tired and hungry to really enjoy it. We were too tired to cook anything, and we knew all the restaurants were closed. So we ate whatever chips and biscuits we could find left over. It didn't really help.

It was still a long drive home, which I only drove a tiny portion of. We ended up getting into bed at about 2pm. Youngy had to drive back to the Central Coast, poor bugger. It was a long day. And a good sleep.