Climbing Mount Exmouth

This went to air on the ABC on Sunday 29 October 2006 8:45AM, and you can still listen to it through this link, if you wish. One reason for placing this here is that Jeff McGill has just been in touch with me to correct a couple of points. I have sought and gained his permission to add his comments as a guest blog: you can find it here.

I keep a standard CV ready for the times when po-faced people ask me for an account of my experience, skills and habits. Among other thing, it says, more or less truthfully, that my hobbies include walking up small mountains slowly and sitting on top of small mountains wondering how to get down. Last September, I re-defined my sense of 'small', but I never planned it that way.

Another hobby is having temporary obsessions, cascades of curiosity that end up as talks like this, or books. This time, my obsession was with explorers in Australia and the methods they used. It will probably end up as a book, but it's had me off chasing all sorts of oddities. I rode camels in Central Australia a couple of years back, in part to work out how John Horrocks came to be shot by his camel.

This time my target was a mountain in the central west of New South Wales, a peak that John Oxley spotted from 130 kilometres away in 1818. By world standards, we have sad mountains in Australia. Our highest peak is barely 2200 metres above sea level, and most ranges are much less.

The Warrumbungles are volcanic remnants in central New South Wales, the result of our tectonic plate having passed over a hotspot some millions of years ago. Mount Exmouth reaches 1206 metres, making it the highest peak in the Warrumbungles. There used to be a road part of the way up, but that's long since closed, so I walked all the way from a car park at about 330 metres, but I thought I had started out much higher up. I'd looked at an old map and when I was thinking about walking up Mount Exmouth, I assumed the top of the old road was my starting place. This was not a good idea.

I'd looked at the contours and worked out the vertical part of the climb, going from the top of the old road about 750 metres above sea level. When I found the road wasn't there any more, I forgot to look at the map again, and missed noticing that I was starting much lower down. I headed off, expecting to walk up a small mountain and sit on it, but I was much more than 450 metres below the summit.

The first part is suitable even for old-age pensioners (indeed I met two British OAPs as I was walking out), and while it rises a bit, maybe 30 metres from end to end, it isn't extreme. Then you come to the old road, and that suddenly becomes steep pinch after steep pinch. It's pleasant enough if you can make your own pace, and because it bends, it's deceptive. You go up a rise, turn, and find another rise, or on one occasion, two kangaroos hurtling down the track. In one straight line it would be heartbreaking; here, it offers constant variety.

I always wear Volley sandshoes when I walk. This upset our English guide in the Troodos mountains of Cyprus recently; she wanted me to wear boots, until I showed her the soles and explained that roofing contractors here wear nothing else. Her eyes flickered at this curious Australian custom, then another Australian in our group clarified, 'On their feet', he said.

This kangaroo saw me coming and stood his ground.

Anyhow, Volleys are traditional with wilderness walkers of a certain vintage. I am of that vintage, and I've walked in them for 35 years or more. They let you feel the ground, so I walk quietly, especially when I am alone. My silent progress meant I was frequently alarmed by kangaroos feeding by the track. Animals that saw me only at the last minute and fled, thumpingly through the bush. My heart thumped even louder, but I knew they'd been equally alarmed.

Something like 250 metres to go!

Two-hundred-and-fifty metres below the peak, you come close to the mountain proper, and from a small saddle, you start walking up. That was the point where I looked more closely at the map and wondered why I was feeling so worn.

I realised my error, that the total climb was more like 850 metres, not 450. I'd now climbed 600 metres, not 200 metres, but having gone that far, I thought I would try a bit more. My legs were querulous but I spoke sternly to them. We would do the last 250 metres, I snarled.

The final climb begins as a narrow trace across and up a scree of loose rock. There was nothing too daunting, but the track drives steeply up to a bend and then doubles back on itself. Off the scree, there's a flat bit through trees, before the path slides up the mountainside again.

At one point I needed to work around a rock face carefully, with strands of fencing wire strung between two trees behind me. It was slippery, nothing dangerous, but I'd seen no fresh footprints on the way up (and I was in fact the only person up that far that day), so I knew help would be a while coming.

I'd posted a walk plan, giving 8.pm as the alarm time to send out searchers, which now seemed a bit late. So I needed to go extra carefully over stuff I wouldn't think twice about down at sea level. There was a steep drop below me, so I just took my time, leaning in and keeping three limbs attached at all times. Serious climbers might sneer at my Nervous Nellie technique, but I felt safer.

That eagle only came close when I wasn't ready.

A wedge-tailed eagle had been circling the peak all morning, and now it swooped in repeatedly, about five metres over my head as I worked around the face. Of course, as soon as I rounded the corner and got my camera out, the rotten magnificent bird lost interest in me and drifted away out of range.

So I just kept plodding up the track, wondering if I really needed all this. Suddenly, I was on top. Well, I was on the ridge, and that meant I only had little jump-ups along the ridge to the peak. My knees groaned a bit, but in the end, they jumped.

It was a perfect day for being on top of a mountain; two days later, I drove past, coming back from the west, and the peak was all wrapped in cloud. But that day I had a perfect monarch-of-all-I-survey view of the Warrumbungles. I ate salami, cheese and dried apples, I drank water, I mooched.

On top of the world.

I went there to see what Oxley saw. I wanted to see Mount Harris (which I'll get to in a moment), but it was hidden in haze. I wanted to see the mountains to the east, which drew Oxley on, through Tamworth and Walcha, down to Port Macquarie, and I saw them, but only as distant smudges.

That teasing eagle stayed well up, but kept flying so its shadow passed over me - it had to be deliberate - and because it was in the sun, I was unable to capture it with the camera. It circled at a distance until a second eagle came into view. They flew wingtip to wingtip, then the new bird rolled over and grasped at the first eagle with its talons, after which the two of them dropped, talons together, falling down the sky before they parted, recovered, and did it again. I wondered at this: was it a mating display or aggression? As far as I could see, they never made actual contact with their feet.

My knees continued to remind me that they're elderly. They'd had enough, they averred. Four hours from starting, I headed back down, each step carefully placed. The day wasn't hot, but I still used most of the four litres of water I took. I never used my kiwi jacket, my sweater, the extra food, the torch or the other emergency stuff, but they were insurance. Best of all, I didn't use the bivvy bag, an orange plastic sack large enough to put broken people in to keep them warm, dry and visible. I've carried it for 19 years, and never needed it yet.

It took three hours of slow and careful treading to get back to the car. I swore occasionally at Mr Oxley, who said that he got up there in two brisk hours, and seems to describe the route I was on. Like most of the so-called explorers, he was probably following what some of them called 'a native road', in other words, a foot track worn by generations of Aboriginal feet.

It was a hard climb.

The day after Mount Exmouth, I drove west, and then north, to walk up Mount Harris, described by a later explorer, Charles Sturt, as 'a hill 120 feet high', but one of just two rises near the Macquarie River. Mount Harris is private property, but the owner, John Egan, gave me permission to walk up it.

John Oxley visited that hill in 1818, saw the Warrumbungles, the Arbuthnot Range, as he called it, and decided to go there. He saw the Great Dividing Range from Mount Exmouth, and decided to push on to Walcha and then to the coast at Port Macquarie. Mount Harris is north of Warren and far enough west for the flies to be bad already. It was of course, the only day that my trusty fly veil wasn't in my pack.

Photography in dense fly swarms is no fun, as anybody who's been in the high country in summer will know. In spite of the flies, in spite of no veil, I came back with 500 pictures. It was spring, and there'd been rain in the west. Not a lot, but enough to make flies and wildflowers flourish.

The area's dead flat, right across the flood plain, so I was amused at one point to find a flood depth indicator in the middle of nowhere. It would be most useful in a flood to have a sign telling you that you'd been driving in two metres of water for the past five or ten kilometres.

It's the sort of country where explorers climb trees or each other's backs in desperation, seeking the sight of a landmark, any landmark, on the horizon. There are no 35-metre trees, so a hillock reaching that locally amazing height is a boon, especially when a person on top can see an interesting peak, almost 130 kilometres away.

Explorers like distant landmarks to take sights on as they travel, because it helps them map their way. One of my beefs with the school curriculum is that trigonometry would be a lot more interesting if the applications of triangulation were given better coverage in maths classes, and it'd be nice if the reliance of explorers on 'native roads' became an element in the history class.

Anyhow, there I was on Mount Harris, which I hadn't seen from Mount Exmouth because it was lost in the haze, but now I could see the Warrumbungles and Mount Exmouth from Mount Harris. They were faint, but they were there. Mr Oxley managed to see each from the other, so he must have been lucky.

Mount Harris was named for John Harris, the surgeon who patched up Governor Phillip after he was speared near my home in Manly. He also gave his name to Harris Street, Ultimo, the Sydney home of the ABC, to Harris Park in Sydney and to at least one other mountain.

In 1801, Harris went on the first expedition to study the resources of the Hunter River, and a hillock there was labelled 'Mount Harris' as well. It was used as a reference point while they were mapping the river, but this mere pimple has since fallen off the map, so I went looking for it.

There's another hill on the Hunter, originally named Mount Ann, and then dubbed Comerford's Hill, and if you go there as I did, it has a road up it called 'Mount Harris Drive', but it's not the original Mount Harris of 1801, so I was glad to have found the surgeon's second and rather more important personal mountain out west. I'm glad I toddled up Oxley's Mount Harris.

And looking back, I'm equally glad I went up Mount Exmouth, but I probably wouldn't do it again on my own, and possibly not even in company; one has to learn one's limitations with age. Or maybe one should ignore the limitations and go out in style? Not just yet though, there are too many Mount Harris-sized small mountains to walk up and sit on top of. I just need to clarify my internal concept of 'small mountain' a bit. Small is beautiful, but the genuinely small can be a joy forever.

Now make sure you read the preceding item in this blog.