North Jawbones, Cathedral Ranges

Mid-morning saw us heading down the Maroondah Highway towards the Cathedral Ranges. The Cathedral Range is an ancient seabed – sand compressed to form rock  where you can occasionally find pieces of rock with ripples in it, like the ripples you find in sand at the beach. This rock has the technical name of ‘ripple rock’.



Cathedral Ripple Rock

Being a seabed, it was flat, with the rocks lying flat. Earth movements, volcanic action and stuff like that pushed up the layers of rock so that they formed the mountain range. The western side, which is seen from the highway, is a slope of broken rock and soil and forest. The eastern side of the range, which you have to travel into the Little River Valley to see, has rock outcrops and high cliffs. 

A photo from a later trip.
Looking north from Sugarloaf.
The Jawbones are the peaks in the middle

In the middle of the range are two peaks, known as the South and North Jawbones. Both have cliff faces on their eastern sides. Between them is a saddle you can walk to known as The Farmyard, a great camping spot. From The Farmyard you can walk south along the Razorback to The Sugarloaf, north along a ridge to The Cathedral, or to the top of the two Jawbones peaks.

Our plan was to get to the top of the North Jawbone.

We parked the car at Jawbones Carpark and started up the wonderfully steep trail towards The Farmyard. About half way up the track a rock cairn marked our point of departure from the hiking trial and we headed to the base of the North Jawbone.

The North Jawbone

The east face of North Jawbone is a 100 metre cliff, broken into three buttresses by narrow gullies filled with all sorts of primeval beasties. Our plan was to split into two parties – Mark and Dale heading up the northern-most (right hand) buttress while Mal and I tackled the central buttress.

The start of the climb,

next to the dark gully!

The weather was pleasant and so we started our ramble up the buttress, Mal leading the way up next to the beasty-laden gully. The cliff lies back at a lazy angle so that gravity isn’t too much of a worry and the rock solid making climbing the cliff itself not too difficult except …

There’s a Python …

“There’s a python”, Mal informs me.

A python? On the cliff? This was followed by the news that “I’m going to go and check it out.”

Mal was climbing about 20 metres above me and I had visions of a dislodged Tiger Snake bouncing down the cliff towards me. Through careful questioning I soon discovered that what Mal had actually found was a piton, an old bit of climbing kit, circa 1950s. His Irish accent can be problem some time.



The pink rope.

We don’t have a red rope …

We were using two ropes for our climbing – a red one and a blue one. It is important to have contrasting colours when climbing with two ropes so that you can let your climbing partner know which rope to adjust. Only the red rope was pink and I refused to adjust it until Mal admitted that it was pink instead of insisting it was red.

“Less slack on the red”

“We don’t have a red rope, only a pink one.”



Ouch …

The evil Kangaroo Thorn bush

Acacia paradoxa, or Kangaroo Thorn, is a small shrubby wattle that can grow on bare rock, it seems. The distinguishing thing about this wattle is that it is covered with millions of really, really sharp thorns. The centimetre long thorns are unique botanically in that each is tipped with a nerve-seeking nose cone to ensure that as it burrows through your flesh it will come into contact with as many nerve endings as possible in order to inflict maximum pain, after which it breaks off and remains imbedded.  The pink rope was totally entangled in such a bush. After a few attempts at untangling I was left with two options: cutting the rope and leaving myself adrift about 80 metres above the deck or grasping the nettle, so to speak.

I was still removing thorns a fortnight later.

Other than those little problems, everything went according to plan and after an hour or two we reached the summit. Resting atop the North Jawbone in the early afternoon sun and taking in the view, our thoughts soon turned to drinking cold beer and so we began our journey home.



Half way up. 
Spot the climber just below
the vegetation, mid-photo. 





Looking the other way,
south towards The Sugarloaf