Climbing Mt. Death

Hi Guys,

Let me share with you an extremely crazy experience we had this past weekend...

Our good friends Dave and Niki (from Brisbane) had invited us on a hike and we'd been looking forward to it for a whole month. We met up with them about half an hour from our place at an area called the "Glasshouse Mountains," which is comprised of 3 mountains, one of which we were to climb (Mt. Beerwah).

There were 7 of us who started the hike...

...but only 5 continued when the "hike" turned out to be more of a mountain climbing expedition (minus the ropes, helmets, and safety harnesses).

The climb was at least 45 degrees steep, with much of it being way steeper than that. 'Why did you continue?,' you ask. Well, I guess we thought that just after the first steep part would be the promised "hike"... our definition of hike- the one where you walk up a steep mountain (not rock-climb up it!). But that kind of hiking never came, and it was pretty much straight up the whole time.



Here we are eating the most well-deserved Subway sandwich of our lifetime at the top...

... and from the top you could also see the other 2 Glasshouse mountains, and the ocean in the very far distance.

Here's Niki and I posing at the top... you can see how sweaty I am, and also the dirt on my shirt from where I wiped out and landed on my ribs on a muddy patch on the way up... ouch!


Coming down the mountain was whole other adventure. We basically crab-walked the whole way down, finding little ridges for our feet to prevent us from tumbling all the way down. It was so scary, and totally killed our wrists and knees!

In this last picture, you can see Dave helping us down the last little bit, showing us exactly where to put our feet and creating hand-holds for us where there were no ridges in the rock.

In hindsight it was actually a lot of fun and a good memory with great friends, but it could have ended very badly had one of us slipped or miss-stepped even a little bit. The funny thing is that Dave has done this hike 30 times, and has taken over 100 people up it, and it's always been okay.

Never again! I thought I was in decent shape, but my quads and pecs haven't been this sore in ages... they are like rocks and I can barely get down the stairs now!