I climbed down to the flake and then began traversing on delicate holds. Jack’s encouragement egged me on: ‘Good on you, Hermann, you’re fairly dancing over those holds!’
– From Bob Jones’ account of the first ascent in 1961
The jagged tooth of Federation Peak spears up from rainforest at the southern end of the Eastern Arthur Range in Southwest Tasmania.
The rock, dense, hard and white, once lay as sandy and muddy deposits on the bed of a shallow, lifeless sea. In Pre-Cambrian times, the sediments were crushed into stone, then buried and baked deep under the surface of the earth. Under unimaginable pressure and intense heat, the old rock melted, flowed and changed.
Much later, but still millions of years in the past, the new quartzite was folded, faulted and twisted as the young earth heaved. Long ages of erosion by water, wind and ice scoured the surface and carved the mountain’s flanks.
High on the ancient face, towards the end of our day on the cliff, I spent an hour perched on a small stance, waiting my turn to climb through the overhang. It gave me plenty of time to admire the results of a thousand million years of geological time – clean cracks, superb friction, positive edges, small, secure holds.
Between my feet, the cliff dropped away in a dizzying sweep to the foot of the Blade Ridge 700 metres below, and my view narrowed to the square metre of rock at my fingertips.
“Picture it flat as a sandy shore,” I said to myself. “Think of it as a day on the beach.“
My long-time climbing partner John Burgess had floated the notion of an attempt on the North West Face at the end of the previous summer. The idea appealed – a classic climb, long and serious, but of moderate difficulty, on Australia’s most sought-after wilderness peak. A rope of three seemed prudent, and we approached wilderness photographer, earth scientist and adventurer Grant Dixon, who was keen to join us. Together, we made a veteran team – John and Grant both pushing 40, and me, closer to 50.
Through the winter, we consulted old route guides, and read the tightly-written descriptions of the pioneers.
In the early days, just getting to the mountain was an epic feat that defeated the first efforts to climb the peak. Fearsome scrub and convoluted route-finding turned back several parties before the top was finally reached in 1949 by a strong team from the Geelong College Exploration Society. Led by John Bechervaise, they followed the Moss Ridge route explored by a Tasmanian party the previous year, set up a base camp on the small plateau to the east of the peak that now bears their leader’s name, then scrambled steeply up to the summit after negotiating the straightforward chimney today called the Climbing Gully.
Even with the benefit of an easy-to-follow, if overgrown route, the steep, scrubby grunt of Moss Ridge still gave us a tough and strenuous few hours, especially lugging packs loaded down with climbing gear. As Grant had promised, Moss Ridge was all straight up – except where it was straight down. Gorilla tactics through the dense and tangled forest led to cliffs of vertical mud, the footholds just pugmarks in the peat, with exposed root handholds as neat as the hang-straps on a bus, though less secure.
After a long first day from Farmhouse Creek, we’d made an early start from Cutting Camp on the upper Cracroft River, and were over the worst of Moss Ridge before the day warmed up. But with no water on the way, I arrived at Bechervaise Plateaeau feeling weak and dehydrated, and while John and Grant scrambled up to reconnoitre the route from the gendarme that overlooks the North West Face, I spent the afternoon reading in the shade, drinking litres of water, and looking up at the lines on the cliffs looming over the camp.
John Bechervaise pictured a hut built here, as a base for expeditions on the crags above. In the April 1949 issue of Walkabout, he wrote:
“This is the perfect site for a rock climbing centre of the future, where the standard of crag equals many of the finest examples abroad. With a sturdy stone structure, simply constructed from abounding material, on this lovely little plateau, and a route cut back to telescope arduous days of approach, the weather could be defied and the final buttresses and gullies provide splendid climbing in summer and winter…“
We set up camp – not Bechervaise’s ‘sturdy stone structure’, but two late 20th century tents and my old green ripstop nylon flysheet, which Grant carefully cropped out of the photos he took on the plateau.
Later in the afternoon, we heard the voices of a party descending from the shelf beneath the Bechervaise Face. By a trick of sound in the rock amphitheatre, we could hear every word of their quiet conversation, as they observed and discussed our camp.
“There’s a Macpac Minaret, and the blue tent’s an Eclipse like mine,” one of them said. “But what’s that other green thing?“
“Dunno,” said his companion. “It looks like something out of my old man’s photos.“
He’d pinned me down in a flash! What was a 46 year old man with a wife and small children doing up here? Why wasn’t my tent fly pitched at Coles Bay? Why wasn’t I on the golf course?
But the answer was easy – just look at a photograph of Federation Peak. Here was a plum sweet enough to keep any self-respecting climber off the beach or the fairway. On the mountain’s stern and frowning North West Face, the line is strong – straight up from the top of the Blade Ridge, up the ribs and ripples to the roof, through it, and on up the line of weakness direct to the summit. A great line, a true classic.
But for all that, the route has had fewer than a dozen ascents, and is little trodden these days. After its first ascent in 1961, the face was climbed several times through the 60s and 70s. Then interest dwindled, and in the last ten years, the route has been repeated only twice. Perhaps its remoteness and moderate grade are enough to take the shine off the climb for the rock gymnasts of today.
The North West Face fell in 1961 to the four man team of Jack O’Halloran, Bob Jones, Geoff Shaw and Robin Dunse. VCC stalwart Reg Williams and Rob Taylor repeated the route two years later, and in 1965, the third ascent was made by another VCC team including names that would become Australian rockclimbing legends – Williams (again), Chris Dewhirst, John Moore, Mike Stone, Jim Newlands and Rock editor Chris Baxter, at the tender age of 18.
“We thought Reg Williams, who’d turned thirty, was older than Methuselah,” Chris Baxter remembers.
As three ropes, this powerful party climbed the face after succeeding on the awesome Blade Ridge below, a feat that began as a minor epic. Baxter recalls one of the memorable moments:
“Olegas Truchanas was up on the ridge filming the climb for a tourism promotion, so we were carrying a 2-way radio and talking to him between pitches. After vetoing Dewhirst’s odd proposal that we bivouac where we were and wait for a better day – it was 8 am at the time – we struggled up in heavy mist for several rope-lengths, irritated by Olegas constantly crackling through the radio in an agitated Lithuanian accent:
‘Where are you, boys? I cannot see you. Do you know where you are?‘
“Cursing him, we pressed on. The mist and rain lifted. We were high above the valley floor – on the wrong ridge.“
Fortunately for us, bad weather seemed unlikely – the evening was perfectly still, and from our camp on the plateau, we watched the light fade on the western flanks of the ranges to the north, and talked about the history and the hard men of our route.
At dawn the weather held fair, and we left the plateau at 6 am, climbing in the chilly morning shade to the head of a gloomy couloir in the notch between the main face and the eastern gendarme. We slithered down a carpet of clinking white scree and over clumps of flowering milligania, dripping from dew, to the first of two short abseils.
A 1966 route description was consulted, and I led off on an unpromising line out of the couloir to locate the traverse to the foot of the face itself. After a greasy grovel through vertical scoparia, it became apparent that it was the wrong way.
“Nothing happening on this pitch. I’m coming down.“
I tried another approach, and after a fumbling start, we located the correct traverse. John led through to the foot of a corner below the Blade Ridge, and Grant climbed the pitch that took us to the point where this remarkable feature meets the North West Face.
It was a splendid and dramatic position. Below, the great knife-edged ridge with its crust of scrub plummeted down to the Northern Lakes, a shimmer of sun on the water beckoning us towards an impossible swim. Above us was the grey-white face, foreshortened into a wrinkled, gleaming expanse, cut off by the frowning roof with its gashed chimney.
John led on, avoiding the ‘shallow grassy cleft’ of the route description by climbing on the clean rock to the immediate right. It was our first real taste of the quality of Federation Peak quartzite, and we found the rock a joy to handle – solid, clean and sharp-edged.
Pitch 5 offered a variation on the theme, and Grant tackled the increasingly delicate rising line in style. On the steepening wall, the exposure was truly impressive, but the small holds, often just projecting crystal nubbins, were reassuringly sound.
I led an easier pitch to Bus Stop Ledge, immediately beneath the line that led up to the roof, 120 metres beneath the summit. To this point, the climbing had been around Grade 13-14, although the positions made it seem more serious. From here, we faced the crux pitches – a corner-crack, a traverse and a chimney.
John led off carefully up the clean, steep corner, and instead of belaying under the roof, which seemed likely to result in some complicated rope engineering, he decided to continue on to the route guide’s ‘thin, sustained traverse’ towards the chimney.
It was a powerful situation – 40 metres above Bus Stop Ledge, tucked under the gloomy roof, 700 metres off the deck, with the only suspect rock of the climb under his fingers. After a longing look at a perfect knifeblade crack with a couple of rusty pegs poking out of it, he managed to place a cam behind a doubtful flake, which echoed ominously.
“Going well, John,” called Grant.
“Dancing over those holds!” I called.
“This is where I need one really bombproof runner,” he muttered.
Then all conversation ceased. We watched him balancing across on tiny holds, climbing with great care, delicacy and patience. Finally, with a long reach, a tiptoe on a ripple, and all his weight on a grating edge, he was across, with a yodel of relief.
John brought us up to his belay point at the foot of the diagonal overhanging chimney, and Grant climbed on, making short work of the first few hard moves over the chockstones that were the scene of the first party’s epic bivouac.
After a late start, they had crossed the traverse in near darkness. Then as rain began to fall, all four of them were benighted in the chimney, spending the hours of darkness perched on various uncomfortable stances, dropping peanuts on each other’s heads and waiting anxiously for the ominous trickling of water to become a deluge. We tried to imagine how they must have felt, marooned in the dark, a dangerous retreat below, and unknown difficulties above. In the morning, the leader avoided an exposed step out of the security of the chimney on to the face by wriggling trouserless through a tiny slit deep in the crack. It looked impossible to us, and we relished the thrill of the exposed move, no doubt helped upwards by the warm sun, the bone-dry rock and the certain knowledge that we’d cracked the climb.
Two wonderful, airy, easy pitches put us on top. It was 6pm. The evening was so calm that there were butterflies fluttering over the summit cairn, and we stayed there for almost an hour, naming mountains on the edge of sight, and drinking in the distant, shining sea.
We were curious and amused at the religious tone of many of the log book entries by bushwalkers, fresh from the exposure of the normal ascent route.
“Praise the Lord, I made it!” said one writer.
“Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus!” said another.
“Dear God, get me down!” implored a third.
In contrast, my companions’ notes were appropriately brief and laconic, but I felt the need to mark what had been my most satisfying ascent in nearly 30 years of Tasmanian climbing. ‘A pleasure and a privilege to be here’ was what I intended to say, but in the excitement I seemed to have forgotten how to spell ‘privilege’. After a brief discussion with the others, I got it right. I closed the book, coiled my new rope, and we began the descent.
Grant and John were already making plans for the next day – a 1971 Lyle Closs/Karl Prinz outing on the western cliffs.
“What do you reckon, Chris? Feel up to having a crack at the Wild West Route?“
For about two seconds, I was tempted.
“No, you do it,” I said. “I’m going to lie on my back, eat jelly beans, read Moby Dick, and thank my lucky stars.“
All day long the sun shone and that’s exactly what I did.
Summary
– The North West Face of Federation Peak
– 402 metres (1105 feet), 10 pitches, Grade 17
– Access: two days walk from Farmhouse Creek, south-west of Geeveston.
Original spreads from Rock Magazine, Spring issue
