As the VCC Access and Environment Officer, many of my climbing jaunts will often include a working bee. While the Arapiles Climb and Repair Weekend has been an ongoing feature of the Victorian Climbing Clubs trip calendar for a number of years, the Queen’s Birthday weekend up at Arapiles was a particularly productive one. Working with Community Group grants from Parks Victoria and collaborating with the Friends of Arapiles, CliffCare is ensuring that the Pharos Gully Track will be able to handle the heavy traffic it receives not only from climbers, but also the walkers. On the Queens Birthday weekend we finally managed to move all the rocks from the top section down to the areas where our stonemason, Walter Braun is working on building up the track using dry stonework. No matter how many working bees I have organized, there always seems to be a huge pile of rocks that seems little diminished. Finally, it’s gone. Many of the rocks still need to be moved into place, but at least the transportation has been done. Now for the lower section….
But the weekend was only dedicated to a small percentage of work. The rest of the time was taken up with climbing. Perfect weather blessed us and we all managed to get a few more ticks under our belt. I had a great weekend, teaming up with Norma and Mike. To be honest, it’s pretty difficult not to have a good weekend at Araps. Has to be one of my favourite places to climb.
If you want to have a look at more of the work that has been going on at Mt Arapiles, visit the VCC smugmug site here http://www.vicclimbingclub-cliffcare.smugmug.com/ for more pics and info and the VCC website http://www.vicclimb.org.au/index.php?location=cliffCare
Stay tuned for the new CliffCare website which will have all the up to date access info for all Victorian Cliffs. Coming soon.