I love winter. When that first cold southerly blows blustery through Melbourne’s streets nearly knocking you off your feet, and the elms along Alexandra Avenue are as naked as skeletons and my wife adds an extra blanket to the bed, I get psyched. Because while everyone else is whining about the cold, I am just thinking, fuck yeah, it’s climbing season.

And not just any climbing season; Grampians climbing season. Because when the cold starts slipping under the door it unleashes a flood of vivid memories, as sharp as the sting of the wind at the top of Flat Rock after a big day shivering on Taipan: the sound of a hand slapping cold sandstone, chalk motes dancing in the breeze; sitting around campfires buried deep in my downie, staring into the flames; climbing when your fingers are so cold they feel like meat hooks, and you have to shove them down your neck to warm them; those perfect blue-bird days when you climb in the sun in the t-shirt; and, of course, those inevitable days bouldering up at the Kindergarten, when the rain and the wind are coming down like the Apocalypse.

Of course, it never actually gets that cold here – despite all our whining. I once read an interview with Fred Nicole where he said that the best friction conditions are between 4°C and 5°C. The coldest I have climbed in the Grampians – when we had a thermometer – was 5°C. For some reason we chose to climb trad routes at Barbican Rocks, which is not only in the shade, but in a deep valley. We lit a fire at the base of the wall, and I climbed up the Lonely Sea (20) in a cloud of smoke, my fingers slowly becoming less and less dextrous with each metre. Over the years I have learnt that the coldest days are best spent with a pad and a down jacket and a bunch of piss-taking mates.

Sadly, this winter is passing me by with too few visits to the Mecca. Life inevitably changes as time passes, and my 10-month-old son is proof of this. A cherubic angel during the day, he punishes us at night, and so it is that my wife and I scrape by on broken sleep and getting away to the Gramps is a distant thought. But still, I tell myself, there will be other winters (running home last night, I estimated maybe another 40 to 50 more). But for now I fit in my fingerboard sessions by the light of a headtorch, run, run, run as much as I can to keep fit – and dream of those days down south in the Victoria Range, when it feels like you and your partner are alone in the world, amidst a sea of vivid green trees and looking across vast, flat paddocks to the curve of the horizon and, best of all, you are climbing on the best rock on the planet.

RT