Reflections of Mount Buffalo
- Anthony
- Mar 26
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 28
When driving up Mount Buffalo Road, you can tell you are in alpine country. The road winds its way through a forest of mountain ash, snow gums, and hardy alpine shrub, evolved to survive the weight of a seasonal snowpack. The yellow lines on the asphalt are a giveaway that come winter, snow will fall.
Along this road, just before the Eurobin Falls picnic area, if you look up at the right moment, you see it—a granite cliff that cuts a cleft through the mountain—connecting top and bottom by a sheer vertical drop. This is simply known as "The Gorge", and its North Wall is covered in climbing routes—all of them serious and committing.
I first touched granite as a rock climber here in January 2019 with friends Andrew (RIP) and Pietro. Climbing a modest-grade slab near the summit of Mount Buffalo was a rude wake-up call for me and my lack of footwork. There were no handholds—you had to trust the friction between the rubber on your shoes and subtle features of the rock, and commit to standing up—hoping your foot wouldn't slip. No amount of upper body strength can help you here.
Mountains were always on my mind, and Andrew, acting as a mentor, knew that exposure to granite would be good for me. "If you want to climb in the mountains, you need to get good at cracks, slabs and dihedrals!" This advice served me well over the years in preparing for some of the more exciting adventures I would find myself on. Many classic alpine rock routes follow these distinct features as they offer a passage through otherwise blank sheets of granite.
After a day of climbing, we sat at the Gorge lookout at sunset, shared a bottle of wine, and admired the line of Ozymandias Direct—a classic of classics and Australia's iconic aid climbing route. Right in the middle of this wall, the tallest part of the wall, the line is so plum your eye is drawn to it, even without looking for it. I had never climbed anything like that. What would it feel like to be up there, on that wall? What would it feel like to fall asleep in your sleeping bag, over a hundred metres off the ground, after climbing all day, knowing there was still more climbing to be done tomorrow, just to get to the top? Andrew told stories of his multi-day aid climbing adventures on that same wall, on a different line called "Defender of the Faith", both with a partner and again as a solo endeavour. He wanted to climb Ozymandias—the "King" line. The thought of a multi-day rock climb stirred something inside of me. Now that would be an adventure.
2019 rolled on, and while I turned my attention to my summer mountaineering trip and rock climbing at Arapiles, Mount Buffalo was often on my mind, and the taster of this trip had set off ideas in my brain.
In 2020 I made multiple trips back, both with groups and a few by myself. I was obsessed with exploring the plateau and slowly working my way through the list of classic climbs that were within my means. Fantastic adventures were had with friends on classic lines such as Maharajah, The Initiation, The Count of Mounting Crystals, Peroxide Blonde, The Pintle, Fat Wall Ordinaire Banana Blasé (what a name), Home James and Caligula to name a few. An experience on Where Angels Fear to Tread left my friend Hywel and I utterly worked by the time we reached the top of the nearly 300 metre crack line.
My Mount Buffalo season approached a climax when I had found a climbing partner suitable—or foolish enough to agree—to take on the formidable Ozymandias Direct. Rijan and I had talked about this all year, and we both committed to getting on it and getting it done.
We put a lot of preparation into this climb. I am known amongst some of my climbing partners for agonising over details and extensively researching approaches, topos and descents prior to committing to a big objective. Yet I don't think I have done so much research and prep work for any other climb as what I did for this one: studying aid climbing techniques and tactics—multi-anchor setups and bag hauling practice from a chin-up bar in my bedroom—practicing setting up the portaledge—agonising over the details of the topo from various sources—and just generally obsessing over this objective. We got on it in January 2021.
Uncertain outcome; a key component of adventure. If you know you are going to pull it off, is it really an adventure? Or just an activity. Lying in the portaledge after day one on the wall, looking up at the endless expanse of granite, I felt like we were having an adventure. There was a lot of climbing ahead of us—two days' worth to be exact—and day one had pushed me. I hoped it was going to get easier, but I doubted that was going to be the case. We felt committed, and that was scary.
The smallest gear I had used that day was a number 0 brassy—a few grams of brass soldered to a wire more suitable for hanging a picture frame than hanging your bodyweight from. The aid climbing grade meant that, whilst being relatively safe from hitting ledges, there are sections with multiple bodyweight placements in a row that would not hold a fall. Each placement had to be assessed before trusting it, and delicacy was required when moving up to stop the piece from ripping out of the wall.
Night two on the wall—the Gledhill Bivvy. I had led the previous pitch and was now desperately attempting to set up camp in the fading light. During our preparation in the weeks before, the portaledge had been hard to set up on the ground with two people. Now, hanging from my harness and on my own, it seemed impossible. I fumed over the mess of fabric and clanging aluminium poles while I heard the screams of terror from below; Rijan jugged and cleaned the Great Roof pitch, screaming in fear as he swung out over the abyss after removing the gear I had placed from the crack. When he arrived at camp, we got the portaledge set up, and I could finally stop. Part of me wanted to start crying. The other part wanted to burst out laughing. Everything up on this wall just seemed so difficult, even the most simple things.
One of my most memorable moments was on the final day, when we were on the upper awkward crack pitches and so close to the top: Rijan was aiding up on some large cams and having a shit of a time—I could sense his frustration building. All of a sudden, "I FUCKING HATE AID CLIMBING!!!" rang out across the Gorge—I wondered what the tourists enjoying the "therapeutic nature experience" thought of these profanities ringing out from the two guys hanging off the side of the cliff, who obviously had no one else to blame for their current situation other than themselves.
Within a few hours, we were standing on top.
Rijan and I made a great team, with both of us being able to use our strengths to keep us moving upward at different points in time—if one of us was spent, the other was right there to keep things going. We were both humbled on this climb and were pretty inefficient with many of the complex big wall systems, but the process was eye opening—It would not have been possible for a climber of my free-climbing ability to have experienced a wall like that without using these complex and slow big-wall tactics. The terrain of that climb is incredible; the steepness and exposure is next level.
Getting off the wall, loading the car up and driving back down the mountain was anticlimactic. Walking through Bright at the base of the mountain, it felt pretty weird being back in town after such an intense few days. It's an experience I'll always look back on and go, that was crazy!
I was so glad I got to share the stories of our Ozymandias ordeal with Andrew, who had generously lent us his portaledge and a few extra sets of brassies that made our ascent possible—his stoke for sharing stories of big adventures was always contagious. This climb had been a dream and ambition of his, but sadly he was taken from this world too soon. Andrew passed away on 22nd December 2021 after a long battle with cancer. His stories and enthusiasm for adventure will always inspire me to go out and explore the world.
The mountains are calling, and I must go.
John Muir
