From the Editor: Fiascos – A Recommendation

When I first began thinking about a fiasco theme for this issue, I decided my Ed’s Letter should chronicle some of my own outdoors fiascos. Man, I thought, this will be a rich vein for me to tap into. I sat at my desk, fingers hovering at the keyboard, ready to tap out a long list of bungled adventures that had gone preposterously south. 

But nothing came. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Give it time, I figured, something will come. But days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and still nothing came. Sure, I have an endless stream of outdoors injury stories: Broken arms, punctured lungs (yes, lungs), a triple-fractured pelvis, a torn ACL … . The number of broken ribs is up in the double digits. So, too, is the number of times I’ve fractured vertebrae.

But injuries alone do not a fiasco story make. It needs an element of debacle. Or at least, multiple things to go wrong and to compound on each other. And, ideally, things should not just go wrong; they should go comically wrong.

After four months of nothing, a dark thought, decades old, bubbled to the surface. It involved a bright yellow Dolphin torch, you know, one of those massive things the size of a brick. I remembered not using it for illumination, however; I was using it as a pillow. And when I say pillow, it wasn’t in the usual sense of a pillow; I just needed something to raise my head out of the water of the literal stream that had begun flooding where we slept.

Flooding. That’s exactly what happened, because once I remembered the Dolphin, all the memories I’d seemingly repressed from that trip came flooding back. I was in first-year uni, and the winter break had arrived. Stuey, Oov and myself had decided to set off to the snow; there was loads of precip forecast, and the skiing looked excellent. But as the date to depart loomed, it became apparent none of us had given this any serious thought. We were students. We had no vehicle. We had no accommodation. And we were broke. The cost of lift tickets, even back then when they were a fraction of today’s cost, was out of the question. We needed an alternative.

As young Sydneysiders have for generations, we looked to the nearby Blue Mountains for inspiration. The forecast was grim. And being winter, the temps weren’t balmy. The heavy precip down south was heading this way, too; in what proved to be a dramatic underestimate, more than 200mm over two days was predicted. For three young, testosterone-fuelled, foolish teenagers, heading into this maelstrom ludicrously under-equipped—being flat broke, none of us had decent gear—seemed an occasion ripe with adventure. And so we set off to the Grose Valley on what we’d dubbed ‘The Real Man’s Camping Trip’ (and yes, we were being ironic).

We jumped off the train at Blackheath, and set off into the deluge. (We later learnt that nearby Katoomba would receive more than 160mm today; tomorrow it would get 275.) By the time we’d walked the few kilometres to Govetts Lookout, we were already soaked. I had a GoreTex jacket, but Stuey’s and Oov’s jackets were pathetic. None of us had the money for rain pants, either; we wore jeans or trackie dacks.

At the lookout, little of the mist-shrouded valley was visible, but we could at least see Govetts Leap Falls lunging impressively out of the clouds. Down we went, negotiating the steps carved into the cliff; so much water flowed onto us it felt we were in Govetts Leap Falls themselves. But it was only once we reached the base of the falls that we realised we’d bitten off something serious. The creek was truly thumping. Actually, it was raging. It wasn’t long until, at one of the creek crossings, Stuey got swept downstream. A little further on, where the creek flowed through a narrow rock channel, I used a two-metre-long stick to test the water’s depth; it didn’t hit the bottom.

We ended up stopping shy of the Blue Gum Forest. None of us owned an actual tent, so we huddled under my 3x4m tarp. Nor did we have a proper stove; just a tiny solid-fuel tablet one that struggled to warm the instant noodles we brought for dinner.

Meanwhile, the rain pelted down. In the midwinter cold, we were freezing, but a fire was out of the question. Not long after we lay down for sleep, a stream began flowing right under the middle of the tarp. In hindsight, we could have moved position; instead we stayed put, and I simply placed my head on the brick-sized Dolphin torch to keep it out of the water.

We slept more-or-less on the ground, with just cheapie closed-cell mats between us and the dirt. Oov did not have a sleeping bag either, and I shared mine with him, with it unzipped like a quilt. It was saturated, though, with the down clumped into a handful of sodden lumps. We lay there shivering; sleep was impossible. Well, nearly impossible. There were three delicious minutes when I dozed off, until an antechinus scurried in and bit me on the toe. There was no chance of sleep after that. It was the longest night I’ve ever had.

By morning, the pounding rain had not let up. We set off, heading back now via Rodriguez Falls. Creek crossings at times seemed almost terrifying. There was one spot where we had to cross fast water above a waterfall. It was genuinely dangerous. Stuey—having been swept downstream yesterday—baulked, pacing the banks like a caged tiger. Coaxing him across took thirty minutes.

Late that afternoon, we dragged ourselves into the pub at Blackheath, where we spent the night recovering. One of us, not me, was so dog-tired and beaten he soiled himself during the night. But here’s the thing: Do I regret this outing? Not one teensy bit. In fact, I recommend everyone have their own fiasco at some stage. I have never learnt more about adventuring in a single trip than this one, and despite it being an utter debacle, I look on it now with fondness. Such fondness, in fact, it seems strange I  repressed it so deeply that I almost couldn’t recall it. But it does make me think: What other outdoors fiascos have I repressed? I’m sure there are many. And boy, they must be doozies.

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