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Sonnie Trotter Goes Down on Tasmania 25-Feb-2016 At 1:07:06 PM Tastrad

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Ever done a new route shortman or are you just a critical bottom feeder. Here's a quote from Bob McMahon's memoirs which is a way more eloquent response than anything I could come up with.

A climb is something which has taken place on a piece of rock and changed utterly, and forever, the nature of the rock. After a climb has been put up, the rock is a different thing. There may be people, purists they would view themselves, who see the virgin rock as becoming a lesser thing for having been climbed on. With this sense of loss uppermost in mind, they hold the belief that the climbs once done, should at the very least, not be publicized. The reasons are many and most of us have a fair degree of sympathy with them. Regardless of all the reasons, my mind switches to an inescapable respect for the facts of the matter, an overwhelming desire to do justice to the creation, (the climb – above all, the climb) and the creator, the person whose act changed the rock irrevocably.

How much we avert our attention from the polluted river and see only the cliffs is brought home when travelling farther up the river past Duck Reach, and the absolute delight one feels as all the elements coincide of clean river, clean rock, clean air and golden sunlight – a coincidence missing from the lower reaches, and we are so impoverished because of it.

The collection of facts is a relatively easy pursuit, especially when the facts are at such close hand, and their arrangement a satisfying thing and to me a significant thing. When all the climbs are listed, described and illustrated, I get a picture of my years of activity that in no other fashion would I get. I see before me the enormous amount of time I have spent rambling this river bed and these river banks. I can see before me the pointers to my intimate knowledge and I know that the time it took is time well and truly filled. This guide should be viewed as the product of a satisfied person who filled his days pursuing that most beautifully useless of all human activities; climbing. (Bob McMahon 1982)