5/4/2023 0 Comments Taipan wall![]() “Parks Victoria is now in an uncomfortable and challenging position as it attempts to enforce 15-year-old management and usage rules after having encouraged climbing for so long,” wrote Lucy Welsh in 2020. Conversely it worked with climbing’s de facto peak body, the VCC, and its environmental offshoot CliffCare, to improve access to popular crags – Summer Day Valley in 2000, Taipan Wall in 2008, The Gallery in 2012 – with climbers fundraising and volunteering their labour. Free Solo, a documentary profiling climber Alex Honnold, won an Oscar and Alex even came to Gariwerd to test himself on its world-class sandstone.īut there was a problem: climbing was to have been prohibited from most of the now-banned areas under the 2003 park management plan, but Parks Victoria never enforced the bans at the time. Climbing gyms opened – five in Melbourne alone during 2015–18, another 10 since 2018 – and the niche pastime went mainstream. Kevin has been climbing in the area for more than 50 years and has put up many notable first ascents. Kevin Lindorff and his son Lachlan climb at Dyurrite. A few climbing community legends cut goat-tracks, established crags and published guidebooks, encouraging hundreds and then thousands to come and play. Occasionally, when they discovered a line that couldn’t be protected with removable or ‘traditional’ gear, they’d hammer in a piton (metal spike) or drill a bolt. They hiked to distant cliffs looking for new routes, and mostly left little trace. During the 1970s, he was part of the second wave of climbers to venture there before it became a national park in 1984. “People have been rockclimbing in Gariwerd for well over a hundred years,” says veteran climber Kevin Lindorff. Much of it is on overhangs favoured by climbers, and some is more than 22,000 years old. Thousands of motifs attest to the presence, knowledge and spirit of its first peoples. ![]() Gariwerd, as the area is known to its Traditional Owners (TOs) the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali peoples, contains almost 90 per cent of Victoria’s known rock art. But most don’t realise this conflict has been brewing for decades. Many climbers consider their environmental footprint to be low and disagree they could be causing harm. Parks Victoria says a rise in climber numbers, bolts and chalk use prompted the bans. Many of the areas set aside are on the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register and include rock-art shelters and quarries from where Aboriginal people took stone to make tools. The bans have been made pending cultural and environmental heritage assessments. Parks Victoria has declared 55,100ha off-limits and knocked out key crags popular for sport climbing, trad climbing and bouldering. In early 2019, I’m shocked to find climbing is now banned in a third of Grampians NP. My life soon revolves around climbing and I begin editing Argus, the newsletter of the Victorian Climbing Club (VCC). It’s not long before I’m at Dyurrite (Mt Arapiles), a rock fortress an hour further north and home to thousands of trad (traditional) climbing lines. ![]() About 500 crags (climbing areas) and 8700 individual routes await, including the legendary Taipan Wall. It’s 2018 and I’m experiencing one of the world’s best places to climb for the first time. An hour later, I lead my first outdoor sport climb, warm sandstone beneath my fingers and joy in my heart. We walk the track towards them, then at the cliff-line take a faint path through the scrub, guided by a 2015 edition of Neil Monteith’s book Grampians Climbing. This is the most south-western point of Australia’s Great Dividing Range: 1672sq.km of rocky plateaus and rugged bushland, three hours drive from Melbourne.Īt Hollow Mountain car park my climbing partner and I gaze in awe at towering, cornflake-orange escarpments. The mountain ranges of Grampians National Park rise in silencing grandeur from the arid Wimmera Plains as a pulse-line of peaks and troughs.
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