Glenbrook Gorge Adventures

I am getting married on Tuesday. In the weeks before highly stressful moments like finals, international trips and marriage, I find myself leaning into risky and arguably self-destructive behaviours. It doesn’t manifest as long lonely nights on the piss or reckless driving but instead an overwhelming urge to head towards the mountains with scraps of information, an inane goal and buckets full of will.

But perhaps the biggest driver is that I’ve been frothing at the bit to do a trip worthy of a report again.

So when Jayden called to do our routine discussion of what gym we could climb at to save the most money, the conversation quickly steered towards doing some night climbing, but Earlwood and its 5m walls wasn’t going to cut it for my frantic state. We figured if we did something in the lower Blue Mountains the drive wouldn’t be too long and well, the next day is a public holiday so we can just go late if need be. And so we had a plan: we’d drive out to Glenbrook Gorge after dinner, find the Mt. Portal scramble down to the climber’s track, try and identify the start, do 5 pitches of adventure climbing in the dark with a few hundred metres of exposure and then follow the ‘faint track down to the Nepean’ to be home before sunrise the next day.

I was picked up at 6pm and we shared a kilogram of buffalo wings between us while the stoke built for what was sure to be a real adventure. Sadly when we arrived at Glenbrook entrance to the national park we found the gates closed. Neither of us were keen on an 8km road bash just to get to the trail head and so we opened up Gaia and started scouring for other possible tracks. It looked like we could park on a cul-de-sac and walk along the river before scrambling up to the cliff-line where we could start climbing. So we drove back, much quieter with a kilogram of chicken in our stomachs and the impending tragedy of a long approach, and found a place to park. I won’t say too much about the access here but getting to that trail involved far too much time on private property.

But before long we were strolling along a mostly fine track with neither of us arrested or even shouted at. It’s actually a really lovely bit of bushwalking for how close is it to Sydney. We crawled through muggy tangles of overgrown bushes and hopped over large boulders underneath a full-enough moon. Night hiking is always quite surreal but being unable to see the stars above for the thrash of river woods feels like entering a whole other dimension. Eventually we found an indeterminate scramble, involving a kind of worm-like dance to get the rope, bag and myself up the scrub-choked dry dirt slope, which had us standing at the foot of some very intimidating and chossy sandstone walls. We traversed across right to the end of the cliff-line and found the start of “Daddy Long Legs” - a two-pitch mixed climb. I knew it was my lead and looked up at the daunting bulge adorning the top of the route.

Now, according to the developers, this is a 13. For the non-climbing inclined, a 13 - especially a modern one - should be good vibes for an intermediate leader. Now as an intermediate leader myself, I get chewed up and spat out by this **** of a climb. The protection I was placing felt good enough but as I got further and further into this roof, I was just indiscriminately breaking foot and handholds. This was showering Jayden with rocks ranging from eye to fist sized and leaving me concerned about the quality of my placement. It’s times like this, flailing in the dark on suspect rock, that you channel the latent force of a husband-to-be and you refuse to fall. Using the power of love, I found a beta that got me out of that hellish contortion, over the bugle and onto a easy dihedral. I let out a gorge-shaking yell, cruised up and placed my posterior on a 5 star belay ledge.

Jayden fought through it himself and immediately congratulated me on a heinous lead. I responded by telling him I was almost certainly going to bail once we got up to the next band of cliffs. However, the next pitch surprised us both with how awesome it was. I sat on belay and watched Jayden work his way through an easy corner before stretching himself across a suspect boulder and then disappearing into a cave at the top. All I could hear was the buzz of insects and the occasional cry of some valley bird punctuated by the whoops of a stoked mate and the far-off horn of the Blue Mountains train. I’d look over and watch the golden lights weave through the nooks and crannies of the valley before looking up to see Jayden in stark outline against a clear night of stars and a massive and ancient pine tree. Talk about surreal!

He crushed it, put me on belay and at 11PM we were eating half a wheel of Brie with some artisan crackers staring down into the moonlit pools of Glenbrook Creek. For our mums and my fiancee, we chatted about whether it could possibly be safe to continue. We figured if it was three more pitches like the second one then there would no issues. If we got another brutal sandbag then we would pike as soon as we can, asking absolutely no questions of the person who decided to pull the trigger. So we built a strange shrine of multi-coloured draws, varying pieces of tat we had relinquished from poor rappel stations in the NZ Alps (a story for another day) and beautiful shiny pieces of protection as we racked back up. We did a quick barefoot traverse and after 10 minutes of searching, we were looking at the 3 pitches between us and salvation. I tied back in and got started.

Thank whatever God watches that quiet corner of Glenbrook Gorge for the easier climbing. I had to battle through the sleep-deprivation mental cobwebs to ensure I didn’t place protection on rocks with clear belayer-killing potential but otherwise moved up this pretty flawlessly. I let out a masculine shriek as I got up to the belay station and saw a massive snake before realising it was just some shed-skin. Phew! Jayden was taking longer than expected but it was all explained when he climbed up and over the ledge, showing me the second snake in five minutes as I realised he was wearing absolutely nothing. I put him on belay over an easy but airy traverse, decided to follow him up barefoot and as we both sat in the scenic nook above the fourth pitch - one of us naked, the other barefoot and both delusional - we realised it had gotten pretty weird fast. You may be confused on why Jayden took all his clothes off but it really just is tradition for people in the Australian outdoor space. A common canyoning oral tradition is the story of the FreezeFest naked Kanangra Main run.

The happiness continued and we were at the top after no time. We argued over whether we should try and bushbash to suburbia and then roadbash to the car or accept our fate and find the trail back to the Nepean. Here’s a little tip for bushwalkers starting their foray into less-trafficked off-route tracks - there are never any short-cuts. It’s taken actual years, but rationality prevailed and we made the mature decision to find our way back to the Nepean where we had a guaranteed track back to the car. It was a bit of a scramble with handlines that would be gnarly for anyone who hasn’t paid the dodgy handline penance canyoning but we handled it all safely and made it down to the Nepean at around 1AM, way ahead of schedule. We treated ourselves to one of the Top 3 Unsatisfying Swims of All Time in the probably clean water of the river and made it back to the car before 2AM. It was a resounding success in the way that we managed not to have an epic but also a resounding failure in the way that we managed not to have an epic. What a fantastic adventure.