Captains of Crush

A Wimmera Summer.

According to the calendar, summer is nearing its final days. Farmers have completed their harvest, and the place now looks and feels like a barren dustbowl. Sweltering hot evenings of unescapable heat. The shrill of cicadas become just more background noise at night. With still a couple of weeks of warm whether to come, there is a hope that the worst of a hot summer in Victoria’s wheat belt is just a memory. (note, this inspired piece of introductory poetry was written while at work on a 38 degree summer day)

Climbing during summer out here is a game of luck. Some days are so hot that the oppressive strangle hold of the sun is all foreboding and unrelenting. Others can remind you of a perfect winters day. Blue sky, gentle breeze, and a pleasant 21^oC ambient temperature.  I’ve never been a fan of the heat. Especially climbing in the heat. The cooling attraction of the gullies, and walls hiding in the shadows however, have reinspired my faith in summer climbing. I do feel very fortunate to be able to take full advantage of summer evenings out here. After work climbing on some of the best rock and routes in the country, in the cool of the shade, on a mild summer evening, does have certain charm about it. Where climbing becomes lifestyle rather than ‘just that thing I do on the weekends’. Or maybe it becomes ‘just that thing I do after work, but before dinner’. 

On the cooler evenings, I was able to get and out climb some great routes like Unrequited, 27, Ciela, 28, and Power, Corruption and Lies, 27. I even got a run up the brilliant Skink, 18, for the first time, in the middle of a string of low 20's days. Plus a slew of other routes done all over the place with different folks.

Chris sending Unrequited on a Wednesday evening.

Chris on Ciela, Thursday afternoon.

Chilly evening afterwork climb with the boys.

Josh in Ethopia

Living out here has changed my perspective on where climbing sits in my life too. I now see a way of making the thing I love doing so much, a part of my life, without it becoming overpowering, overburdening or oversaturated.

Too hot to climb? Never mind. Wake-boarding on Green Lake with Taipan in the background.

But as goes with life, circumstances continue to evolve. As Robert Burns so eloquently put it,

"the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray"

University started up again this week, and my proposed idea of living in Nati while studying by correspondence has not come into fruition. I came out here to try and work and climb. Mission accomplished. But I came out here because I could work and climb. I got to work in a field that is where I wish to end up in after my studies. And in order to get back here in the future, full time, I need to make sure I’m fulfilling my desire to learn and educate myself as well as I can. After all, I climb because I love it, and I’m at school because I love it.

To study by correspondence for what I want to learn, would not provide me with the feeling of accomplishment. Of having got all I could from my education.

So, with summer ending, and the days getting shorter, I’ll be returning to Melbourne. For the first semester I will still be based in Nati, catching the train back and forth for 3 days in the city every week. Climbing and school occurring in harmony. Well, hopefully. Come second semester, there is a good chance I’ll be back in Melbourne until I finish the degree, with perhaps another Wimmera summer squeezed in there.

Sunset from Claires farm in Pomonal. 

-TheBigAl