Innholdsfortegnelse for March-May 2021 i Vertical Life

HOW AND WHY DID THIS ECONOMIC ANALYSIS COME ABOUT? What has been a frustration over the past year is the feeling that climbers are seen as being of no tourism value. The reality is that we are most often highly skilled or professional and we visit regional Victorian areas with a frequency unlike any other recreational tourism group. I was increasingly aware of the positive benefits of climbing after reading studies in the USA and was interested in applying a similar approach in Australia. At about the same time I heard of a friend who was planning a climber survey and asked if I could include some economic and health questions. After that I put my house building project on hold to make the time. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO…

DON’T MISS THESE FOUR CRACKING CLIMBING FLICKS, HEAD TO WWW.REELROCKFILMTOUR.COM.AU TO GET THE DOWN-LOW ON SHOWS ALL AROUND AUSTRALIA AND GRAB YOURSELF A TICKET.…

“THE LANGUAGES WE SPEAK EVOLVE AND AS THEY DO WORDS SHIFT CONTEXTS AND BECOME INFUSED WITH NEW MEANINGS. WILD THEN IS MERELY ANOTHER SUPERLATIVE, ANOTHER WAY OF STATING ‘VERY GOOD’. IT IS NOT ONLY A DESCRIPTION OF IMPENETRABLE FOREST, IMPOSSIBLE SUMMITS AND BATTERED COASTLINES.” The images were striking: climbers in brilliant colours clinging to even brighter holds snaking up a stained grey wall. You can’t tell from the photos, but the climbers are ascending an enormous concrete stack, the highest chimney in Europe, on Slovenia's Trbovlje Power Station. Below, in the soft focus of the world left behind, we make out some squat buildings, a river runs through them and there are hints of forest in the corner. The images gave me a jolt, of the kind that you get…

Bischoff made it happen, all I did was press the button on the camera and hope I didn’t stuff it up. It was the second time I had rapped 100m down the Main Face of Mt Brown to shoot Simon Bischoff and Alex Hartshorne on Arrested Development. It’s a monster route: rap down Snake Gully (avoiding the serpents), scrape across a short pendulum, saunter along a 200m sea level traverse to a short rap to the start of the climbing, then climb six pitches of mixed grade 23/24, to an absolutely stonking 26 (Lizzie’s Pitch), fuel with noodles and fauxccino ‘coffee’ because nutrition and hydration are critical to success, then suit up for the business; a grade 29 (or there-bouts) right-trending prow comprised of three boulders – ‘You have to…

Habit: something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it. A wise person once said ‘we are what we repeatedly do’. And one thing we do more than anything is eat food. Every food choice we make works its way into becoming a habit. Whether that's nailing your pre- and post-training nutrition, eating three proper meals every day or taking the darker path of too much alcohol every night and lunching on junk food every day. Deciding the ‘right’ way to eat can seem overwhelming and confusing to many people. So here are some food habits to make you climb harder and have a better life. F*@K THE FADS. Intermittent fasting. Ketogenic. 5:2. Low carb. No sugar. You don’t need an extreme trend to…

My feet were getting raw from walking in the sand. So I put on my shoes and then kept walking some more. We had been walking for hours, to the far jebel (mountain or range of mountains) to solo an easy route on its back side. That night the moon would be full, and in the glow would come the perfect opportunity to fly from the summit of Jebel Khazali. We came to Wadi Rum in Jordan to climb and fly as many big lines as we could. Inspired by guidebook descriptions and beta from friends, the lines up the 500m-high domed summits seemed the perfect launch site for our single-skin gliders. We would climb and carry the light and compact gliders in our day packs on easy routes. On…

I first met Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll at Stapylton Campground in Gariwerd/Grampians in the rapidly receding tidal wave of the Millenium Bug panic back in 2000, when we were all asking, ‘What was it we were worried about again?’ Sean was a floppy-haired 19-year-old at the end of a world climbing trip, his elbows riddled with tendonitis brought about by an insatiable appetite for climbing that didn’t include rest days. He had a curious accent that reflected his half-Irish, half-Belgian heritage, although we all liked to take the piss out of him and insist that he was half-French, half-American, which he hated, a fact that only encouraged us to be even more obnoxious. Back then Sean was a super-talented sport climber who could onsight 29 (which was relatively rare at the…

PROS warm-as; big; reassuring fit; solid hood CONS heavy-as; potentially overkill; big I feel the cold, even when it is not really cold, and so I love wearing very big jackets. TNF’s HMLYN jacket is big and warm and I like wearing it. In terms of features, the HMLYN’s lack of vowels hints at it being a stripped down version of TNF’s expedition jacket. A little more street, a little less Hillary Step. It has 550-loft down, stormflaps, an insulated hood and is made from ripstop fabric for increased durability. The pockets are roomy and comfy, but I think I’d prefer them to be angled, a minor quibble and certainly no deal-breaker. Sometimes when I find myself thinking about climbing tech gear I drift off to think about space exploration.…

I wake to the sound of my alarm clock. It's 6am. But I don't mind the early start today. As I lie in bed I take a big breath and open my eyes, I look up and smile. My day will be spent in a harness and tight rubber shoes climbing rocks with my best friends. Summer days in Queensland are either unimaginably hot and sweaty, or downright flooding with wet, windy storms. Frog, like many other crags, is out of season, leaving us to find shelter in one of our unique caves. Climbing in caves is like nothing I had ever done before moving from the home of crimps, the Blue Mountains. The mild breeze means you can escape the sticky summer air, the steep and inverted climbing will…

The qualification process for climbers to make the Tokyo 2020 (yes they are still calling it that) Olympic Games is slightly complex to explain. The end result is 20 males and 20 females from all over the world will come together at the beginning of August to compete for their countries. In late December, Oceana Mackenzie and myself qualified and will be the sole Australian representatives. I’m pretty psyched! If it were a non-pandemic year, I’d be planning overseas training camps and World Cup events. The experience you learn from being fully immersed in that scene is invaluable and not something we have replicated in Australia quite yet. But we are in a pandemic year, so the next six months are a much bigger unknown. We have a Plan O…

It’s mid-morning on 14 September 1991. The Krottenseer Forst in Germany’s Frankenjura is silent save for the distant warbling of wood pigeons and the tickling breeze in the autumnal canopies. This picturesque vision of silence is faintly disturbed by the unceremonious, creaking groan of overloaded tendons, the flaying of calloused skin grinding over narrowradiused limestone pockets, an imminent deluge of claret doing its darndest to hold itself back and not stifle the efforts of our saintly protagonist just… long… enough. Seventy seconds of extreme climbing artwork is over! And history is burnt into the retina of climbing lore. Wolfgang Güllich, with barely a sign of effort, has climbed over the top of the crag Waldkopf to complete his magnum opus – Action Directe; the world’s first 9a/35, and the greatest…

We’re getting to the pointy end of Australian climbing. There are only 14 routes graded 34 in Oz, according to TheCrag.com. As usual, it was hard to pick one from amongst some strong contenders: White Ladder, a classic with an origin story that is longer than the route itself, but we wanted something that hadn’t been profiled before; Mr Pink was suggested as well, although its murky history put us off; while some of Tom O’Halloran’s additions at Elphinstone – Sue’s Last Ride and The Milkbar – look stellar. But we thought we’d go for something old school. Lee Cossey’s Sneaky Old Fox at Diamond Falls. We quite like the description of Sneaky Old Fox on TheCrag.com: The greatness of life is impossible to realise before you cast your eyes…

PROS: dynamic; strong; adjustable; predictable CONS: another piece of kit you have to carry; sits big on the belay loop; can be strenuous to let out slack; dangly rope tail when stored on the harness; not redundant; pricey The Petzl Connect Adjust is a Personal Anchor System (PAS) made from a length of dynamic rope sewn into a loop at one end, in the middle it passes through an single tube ATC-style auto-locking device and at the other end it has a stopper. It comes with a rubber plug to make sure that the Connect is correctly oriented on a locking karabina (it doesn’t ship with a locker and the one you use must be thick enough to ensure that the cam locks). You attach it to your harness with…

EVOLV ZENIST RRP $259.99 The Zenist is not someone who practices Zen, as you might justifiably assume it to be, no, it’s actually a climbing shoe from Evolv specifically slanted towards competitions. We presume that not only will they help you to take out the top gong at Nationals, but they’ll also give you the stick and the spring to blast past your mates in the gym – after all, you don’t have to be wearing a bib to be hyper competitive. Feedback is critical in climbing and the Evolvers say this shoe gives a lot of feedback (TBH we prefer the honest feedback from our shoes over the less reliable kind we get from our competitors, 'You’re too weak!' 'Your technique is terrible!' etc.). The vegan upper won’t stretch…