words By Dave Barnes
pic by Simon Carter
Tasmania is a weird place, akin to Jurassic Park with weird animals, psychotic weather, dark forests, and mountains that look like dinosaurs waiting to pop out from behind the peaks to eat you. Then there are the sea cliffs, giant escarpments of dolerite and granite that have stood defiant through glaciated change and the Southern Ocean that pounds Van Diemen’s shores. Amongst those stands the Totem Pole, a 70 metre high sea stack surrounded by pounding seas. Every route feels like it could kill you.
It starts with the early morning approach with full kit – a one-and-a-half-hour slog, then the rapp in, which may as well be a descent into hell. The climbing is difficult, requiring survival and technical skill. And getting off of it is a leap of faith – a mind-bending Tyrolean traverse back to the mainland, followed by reversing the approach walk back to Fortescue Bay, already totally spanked from the adventure.
The Totem Pole is one of the most documented and iconic climbing sites in Australia, and rightly so. It’s got the lot, like a James Cameron movie, it’s action packed, each moment filled with suspense. You aim for its tiny summit and pray it does not fall over and sink like the Titanic. These thoughts are what fill the heads of climbers who are crazy enough to entertain a mission out there at the dead end of Cape Hauy.
The climbing history is a list of ‘bat out of hell’ climbers. If they did not have a profile before their Tote experience, they will have one afterwards. At the very least they will have a ‘stop traffic’ story for any mountain bar anywhere on the planet.
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