and so today...

I delt with the biggest f-off spiders I have dealt with for ages! Man these things were big. Serves me right for going first on a path that obviously was not well defined ... or even a path. But, by going off the track the view was pretty spectacular. I ended up on the central coast today clambering across stuff that was probably not meant for people to cross. I went on some bush tracks and I even gave my climbing skills a bit of a work out. The image to the left is of the boulders that I went a "bouldering" on. It was amazing. It seemed like we had stumbled across a section of the hill where it had tumbled down upon itself in big chunks. The way the rocks had landed on each other had created some small caves. I tried to squeeze through some of these. I actually had some very cool adrenalin pumping at one point when I discovered the boulder I had just climbed on to revealed another large solid boulder that went straight up like a wall and to climb further over it I would have had to have had some mighty good climbing equipment or if I tried really hard I may be able to squeeze under it. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I had a nagging thought of being squashed under 350 tons of solid rock so I had nowhere to go other than re-trace my steps back down and follow a path up the other side of the rockfall. "BIG GIRLS SKIRT" I hear you say.. but I was wearing my "good" t-shirt and didn't want to dirty it. :) It was hot, sweaty and I was not too happy with the humidity (the second last pic). After trying to climb some more of this rock fall, I now understand how it may be easy for climbers to be trapped beneath boulders. You can see from the third pic to the left how big some of these boulders were (Judo is in the left of the pic. This incline of boulders was greater than 65 degrees). Now, I know this is a stretch but, do you know of Aron Ralston? He's the dude who cut his own arm off when he was trapped by a boulder that moved and pinned him with no escape. It was playing on my mind, knowing that these rocks were here because they "fell" here and I was putting my weight on them as I pulled myself up higher and higher. I could never understand how he did what he did, but I can understand how you would assume these boulders were not going to move. It was just a very freaky accident.

I was having fun. We never found what we were looking for, but, we both had a good time exploring a place that we had never been before.