Staying in Control

Steve has been away for about a month visiting family and friends in the UK, and has a couple of weeks before the last rounds of chemo kicks in.  So rather than catch up in town we decided on a trip to Welly Dam.  It was a lazy start and we were in no rush to pack the routes in.  I’ve been making the most of my holiday and getting out heaps, so did not feel the need to go hard.  And Steve has not been climbing for quite a while, plus is a little more rotund from the Christmas tradition of eating and drinking more than is really necessary:

For those interested the above image is of the remains of a king skink.  There was only one leg remaining and the tail was nowhere to be found.  It was in fact mostly an empty shell with only a few bones still intact.  There is no real reason to include this gory image, other than it was a fascinating find!  Steve was keen to lead Murky Corner, and looked a little perplexed at the crux.  He needed to take a moment once he got past that section.  Leading us to pondered on the sense in him leading, and deciding that he would do no more:

So unlike my last three trips out, it was my turn to be the lead slave and Steve took my camera and subjected me to what I do to others.  Taking images while not putting me on belay until I had clipped the first bolt.  I didn’t mind too much, after all I’ve been known to boulder up to the first clip on every route and then down climb, so I should know the routes pretty well.  While Steve’s leading head wasn’t ready he followed up with style, knocking Pocket Knife and then Raging Torrent on the head:

Next we plumped for Gumby Goes Bolting, a route that messes with my head and one that Steve has very little recollection of doing.  While he was on this route a fire truck pulled up and two fire fighters came across to us and started to apologies.  Thoughts of bushfires immediately came to mind, the national park had been closed for a number of days before Christmas due to them.  It was fortunately nothing like that, all they were going to do was put the sprinklers on as the timer unit had given up on them:

We had a good old chin wag with them before they turned the sprinklers on and left us too it.  We knew from the early morning trips here that we would stay dry even when belaying.  Steve continued up Gumby and was looking confident and flowing, so we then moved onto Savage Sausage Sniffer.  During all this time we had a tea break and copious amounts of chatting between climbs, we would normally rattle a climb off every 30 min but today it was more like one every hour.  This was the last route on the main wall and was too savage for Steve, he simply ran out of juice:

I cleaned the route and as I was getting ready to lower back down we could hear the sound of a chopper coming up the valley.  No doubt checking the condition of the prescribed burns that were scheduled for the day to make sure they stayed contained.  While I’ve seen the shark spotter helicopters along the coast almost every time we’ve been out recently, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a chopper at Welly Dam.  Maybe a sign of how nervous they are of not having a repeat of the fires that hit here before Christmas: