Table of contents for Winter 2021 in Vertical Life

Lately I’ve been dreaming of old friends. They’ve been haunting my nights largely because of this edition of VL, which is built around the idea of family. It’s gotten me ruminating on how my relationships with family and friends have changed with time, and how the boundaries between the two can be slippery. Back in my 20s, my friends felt like family. We lived together. We worked together. We spent most of our spare time together climbing or training or hanging out (usually playing endless – and ruthless – games of Shithead). We had our own little quirks and traditions, nicknames, greetings. But times change. These days those friends have dispersed to the four winds. Ironically it was when we started our own families that our family of friends began…

The Child’s right hand slaps again and again at the blunt ledge, hoping for a better hold, failing to see the big side-pull above, too pumped in mind and body to make good decisions, failing to throw a heel up, too afraid to commit for the vision of pinging off and cratering into a wall that has been responsible for more than a few limps and cracked skulls. The Child’s grimace sours even more, he makes a skittering move back towards the spike jug halfway across the traverse. Then whoosh, the blur, he is off. It was then that he, Oedipus, slayed me, his father. The tale of Oedipus is horrifying. A tragic Greek hero who unknowingly kills his father, the king of Thebes, outwits a menacing Sphinx and unwittingly…

THE ELDEST CHILD CAIT HORAN The climbing bug hit the Horans when I was in my late teens. I landed a casual job at Canberra Indoor Rock Climbing and really the rest is history. The gym was looking to start a junior development program. I am the eldest of four children*, which obviously makes me the reliable, conscientious, the best looking, the highest achiever amongst us, and so I naturally put my hand up to coach the squad. My little sister, Emma, is the youngest, which of course means she is manipulative, spoiled, attention seeking and likely to drop you because she is on posting on Insta while belaying. But in spite of these deficiencies, we have been thick as thieves from the moment she was born. So at seven…

And so we come to the current zenith of the Australian grading system, grade 35. There’s just four 9as in Oz – Schweinebaumeln, Kitten Mittens, Baker’s Dozen and the very first, The RED Project. We thought we’d go with the original, The RED Project, first climbed by visiting German wunderkind, Alex Megos, way back in 2013. According to the keeper of Diamond Falls lore, Lee Cossey, the route comes to us via a veritable Who’s Who of Australian climbing: Kim Carrigan apparently put in the first bolts, Garth Miller then placed five glue-in rings and Lee himself finished bolting the line in the early 2000s. The line then went many years without a suitable suitor, unil along came the Mega Megos. The project was pointed out to Alex, who rocked…

As we take the road west from Natimuk, we come to a fork just out of town. Turning right, we come across a dusty old armchair sitting among wispy stalks of wheat on the edge of the road. Beyond, the empty frame of an old billboard prevails, and in the distance, across a sea of wheat, the orange ramparts of Dyurrite/Arapiles keep watch over the Wimmera. We pause to take a closer look and discover that this scene is not a happenstance of hard rubbish, but an installation. At the artist’s invitation, I sink into the armchair and stare through the frame at The Mount. The scene is impossibly tranquil. On subsequent trips, I can never get enough of this piece, inspired by Greg Pritchard’s original. My partner, Sax, doesn’t…

TEN-YEAR-OLD Bodhi Miller woke up one morning and said to his dad Garth, ‘I want to go climbing.’ Two years later Bodhi sent his first grade 30. A year after that, his first grade 33. Garth Miller is one of the best climbers Australia has ever produced, and probably still Australia’s best ever onsight climber. He was famously the second person to onsight 32/8b+ with his ascent of Cannibals Direct at American Fork, while he also onsighted Better Than Life (32) at Centennial Glen and numerous grade 31s. No ordinary climbing partners. Both father and son say there was no pushing, no cajoling. ‘Naturally you hope that your kids might partake in the outdoor adventure activity that is your passion but I would never push it. We did loads of…

A group of shirtless climbers huddle together at the base of the hardest problem in the gym. The alpha male works his way up the steep route with barely visible holds, throwing in a deftly executed campus move to a horrid crimp on the way to the top of the wall, to be rewarded by cries of jubilation and support from his lesser gibbons. Alpha gibbon drops to the mat, immediately to be offered a line of fists which, he must bump his own fist against in succession. All this while families of lesser simians gawk and stare. Me and the group I was climbing with pick our jaws off the chalky mats and resume our siege on what might have been a lowly V1, secretly hoping that maybe one…

Our world is stone Shaped by water and wind and time It sweats when it’s hot And sticks when it’s cold It’s the place where we gather And tape our fingers And huddle together to wait out storms Where we’ve learned to try hard And learned to fail And sometimes succeed Learned when to hold on And when to let go We’ve made families here Shared beta Returned each season, year after year Finding our wildness in wild places Spoken its language Studied its cracks and fissures Its imperfections and its characters The moves that make up each route The climbs that make up a life The voices that make up a community The ones that call us back Home…

Amanda Watts is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Accredited Nutritionist and SDA Sports Dietitian at Thrive Nutrition & Dietetics. She is sponsored by Tenaya, Black Diamond, Chalk Cartel and Beal. Eating habits are socially transmissible. We tend to model other people’s eating behaviours – the good old, ‘if other people are doing it, I should probably be doing it too’. Humans have a proclivity towards adapting their eating to match whoever they are eating with. Research tells us that both the food we choose and the amount of it we eat, are very much influenced by other people and this plays a big role in our social identity. So much of our eating is social. Most of us share at least a couple of meals a week with our friends and…

8C+ MGCHALKCOAL $22.95 PROS: blends in better than white chalk when you’re climbing on the right shade of grey sandstone. CONS: stands out almost as much as white chalk on red and yellow sandstone; more expensive. Chalk has always created cognitive dissonance in my universe. On the one hand I hate tourists who leave their scratchings and tags on the rocks where I climb, on the other I leave a trace of my path up the rock – a series of white smudges. Most of the smudges get washed off, but some do not and are, in effect, permanent. I see myself as different from bogan tourists, but am I? Others – Parks Victoria and Traditional Owners – don’t see the distinction we climbers make between chalk and graffiti, to…

Watch THE NEW KID: W/SAVANNAH CUMMINS, ANA PFAFF, CONRAD ANKER, JIMMY CHIN, CEDAR WRIGHT AND ALEX HONNOLD The North Face gang go to Antarctica and have adventures. This short film is another one that blurs the line between doers and documenters, between what is the scene and what is behind the scenes. Expeditions have long had the pressure of being recorded in order to justify their existence, and so we might ask that if a peak is climbed in the middle of the ice forest and no one is around does it make any sound? ‘Document or die’ could be the climbing version of academia’s ‘publish or perish’, even more so as we shift from a ‘pro climber’ media landscape to a ‘climbing influencer’ one. So often now the process…

‘Blood is thicker than water’ surely you’re familiar with the phrase? It always seems to come up when family is involved. That, above all, the ties that connect us are strongest in our blood. What is coded in our genes, what flows in our veins, is our debt and duty to those who birthed us. But curiously enough, though blood may be thicker than water, even this old proverb has had its meaning diluted. The original quotation is supposedly: 'The Blood of the Covenant is thicker than the waters of the womb', and yet even this old English proverb has its roots in an Arabic proverb, 'Blood is thicker than Milk', meaning that the connections forged when we shed blood, sweat and tears are stronger than what held us in…

My climbing career was over. Or at least my dreams of climbing hard were. Dramatic but inevitably true – or so I believed. You see, I’d just made it through the upper crux of Livin’ A Hustler’s Dream at Nowra. I was at the last marginal shake out before the final few moves to the anchor. I felt strong – stronger than I ever had before. I rehearsed the final moves as I concentrated on my breath. The route was totally in the bag – the taste of victory already on my lips. Except it wasn’t. A momentary loss of tension – a foot slip – and I’d failed. My cry of anguish cut through the crisp winter air. I lowered down, certain it would go next shot. After a…

I’m on a hanging belay. My climber is out of eye/earshot and the rope hasn’t moved in 15 minutes. ‘What is going on up there’, I muse as I attempt to re-establish the circulation to my feet by shifting my leg loops further down my hamstrings. I’m passionately regretting trading 300g of down and nylon for the silver cam still dangling from my gear loop. Meditation is inadequate to mitigate my discomfort. My mood begins to spiral downward. Every passing minute stretches my patience, my belaytionship. But then, I catch myself, remembering that ultralight piece of gear that’s as precious on my rack as my nut tool: a clue from the cryptic crossword I started over breakfast. At first only nonsense, but expressly learnt and you’re ready to go (2,5).…