BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
THE MOUNTAIN RANGES of Grampians National Park rise in silencing grandeur from the arid Wimmera Plains as a pulse-line of peaks and troughs. 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.
At Hollow Mountain car park my climbing partner and I gaze in awe at towering, cornflake-orange escarpments. 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. An hour later, I lead my first outdoor sport climb, warm sandstone beneath my fingers and joy in my heart. It’s 2018 and I’m experiencing one of the world’s best places to climb for the first time. About 500 crags (climbing areas) and 8700 individual routes await, including the legendary Taipan Wall. 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.
My life soon revolves around climbing and I begin editing , the newsletter of the Victorian Climbing Club (VCC). In early 2019, I’m shocked to find climbing is now banned in a third of Grampians NP. Parks Victoria has declared 55,100ha off-limits and knocked out key crags popular for sport climbing, trad climbing and bouldering. The bans have been made pending cultural and environmental heritage assessments. 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. Parks Victoria says a rise in climber numbers, bolts and chalk use prompted the bans. Many climbers consider
