Another guest video, this time of ‘Stu’ climbing at Mount Arapiles, Victoria. I like this video because the ‘helmet cam’ really gives a great insight into multiple pitch outdoor rock climbing for people who have never climbed before, or only climbed at indoor gyms.

So if you have only ever climbed indoor before and wondered how rock climbers climb those giant cliffs hundreds of meters high, this clip will help you understand how it is all done…

Here is the video footage from Juggler Canyon.

Is was a stinking hot day on November the 20th 2007, the day which we had set aside to do Juggler Canyon (sometimes known as Pilcher Canyon). We drove to the Katoomba Airfield, turned off onto the 4wd track and drove to the powerlines - only to quickly realise that we had misread the directions after searching in vain for the path. We drove back up the dodgy 4wd track and parked the car in the obvious car space and walked down the other fork of the road this time, as directed by Rick Jamieson’s guidebook.

The walk in was pretty quick - before you knew it we were scrambling down this wet moss covered rockface, trying not to slip and fall. We managed to make it over the first obstacle without needing to pull out and set up the ropes, and then we proceeded down the canyon, scrambling over rocks and fallen trees for quite as long time before eventually reaching the first abseil.

The first abseil was really nice. Crystal clear water flowing into a beautiful clear pool at the bottom (which we all did our best to avoid stepping in!). Immediately upon hitting the bottom of that abseil the second abseil was within sight up ahead on the ledge to the left. Abseiling down that, we realised that there was a second drop off just beside us which would be a little too difficult to abseil down, so we decided to just continue the one abseil over it rather than setting up a second 3-4m abseil. And once again, immediately upon finishing that abseil, the third abseil was not far off from another ledge on the left hand side of the canyon.

The third abseil is the largest, a little over 20m high and all overhanging (gloves really help I discovered). The exit is indeed quite tricky when you use the bottom anchor point; there are two anchors on the same tree - One around the roots, and one from a branch up at about stomach height. We opted to use the bottom one because that would be the most secure/safest anchor, however it is quite clear why the higher anchor is there, the lower anchor makes the immediate overhang exit very difficult when your anchor is below your center of gravity. You have to be able to commit and just let yourself drop a meter or two to clear the overhang. Anyway, the abseil proceeded fine and brought the abseiling section of the canyon to an end.

The rest of the canyon was just more scrambling over rocks and fallen trees - sometimes the rock scrambles were quite difficult with large slippery areas where it was difficult to stop yourself from sliding down a small drop onto rocks. We managed to make it through without any broken ankles though, and when we reached the tourist trail on the other side of the main creek, we walked downstream to Beauchamp Falls and had lunch there.

Walking back upstream from the falls we managed to get lost a couple of times, following the wrong branch of the track - once it turned back and followed the cliffline, which led us to a large rockslide to the left side of Beauchamp Falls. We walked back to the creek and followed it upstream onto realise that we were meant to cross to the otherside at some point, but we missed it. Nonetheless we managed to get back on the tourist track easy enough in the end and walked up to near the end of Grand Canyon where we easily found the trail which took us back to our car.

• Juggler Canyon Guide
• Juggler Canyon Photos 

We’ve been live for just over one month now, and I am incredibly happy with the progress so far. This project has been faster, easier and more fun than I expected. Everything has been made to fit to the same general layout except for the wiki guidebook, which is unfortunately too complicated for me. I have although met someone through the UNSW Outdoors Club who is a software engineer and he seems keep to help out, so maybe he can straighten that all out for me and have the entire site looking unified finally.

Besides the Wiki Guide though, I re-installed a new forum and made that conform to the general layout, so the forum looks good now (just need some of you people to start registering and posting!). The Photo galleries look awesome, I’m very happy with how that turned out. I will continue to add all of the best photos from all of the trips I go on - that of course works in with this blog, the trip reports section, where I will continue to write up our trip reports, add videos from our trips, and add videos from other outdoor activities which I thought were worth watching.

I am interested in having other people submitting their own trip reports, photos, and/or video logs from trips. So don’t be afraid of email me (aegist at TDMSKP.com.au) if you are interested in doing that. Until we have a number of regular contributors though, it will continue to just be me posting in here. I will keep to a general format of trip report, trip video, video of interest, and maybe a website update like this if appropriate.

With nearly all of the website looking the same, and the general photo gallery and trip reports section just moving along smoothly, all of my attention is on the guidebook now. Unfortunately, wiki guides are almost useless until you have a lot of people editing them, and you don’t get a lot of people editing them until they are worth visiting… So that means I am spending all of my time now just adding content to the guidebook. I will try to update the guide, with photos, for every trip we go on; I am also copying generic information from wikipedia about some of the normal facts of outdoors sports (even this is time consuming though). Nonetheless, this is where my time is going, and it is starting to come along. I think less than 6 months, and we will start seeing critical mass in that department.

Wrap Up

So, to bring this post to an end let me list all of the things I would *love* you eternally for doing:

1. Participate in the forums
   Register, and make some posts. Subscribe to the threads you post to. Come back regularly, and you will become one of the founding members of what I am determined to make the largest outdoors community in Australia
2. Edit Articles in the Guide
   It isn’t that difficult, and they don’t even have to be good. Just make new articles, write anything you can think of, and save it. The more content in it, the better, even if it is bad. Bad content at least allows other people to come through and tidy it up.
3. Subscribe to this Blog!
   The top of the right hand side menu is a link - Click it, enter your email address. Or scroll to the very bottom of the page and just enter your email address. Feedburner handles the subscriptions, so I don’t even get your email addresses, they are all handled by a Google company - so you can be completely confident that your email addresses are safe!

You don’t even have to do all 3, any one of them would be cool!

Shane

OK, a bit of a change in pace (and risk!) here. This is certainly something I would never do (nor 99.99% of all other rock climbers on Earth) but is really is quite incredible. Dan Osman was a pioneer for the sports of Rock Climbing and Rope Free Falling, and his death was an incredibly unfortunate event (even if somewhat expected) .

All that aside though, just sit back and watch the 1.5 minutes of exhilaration…