Climbing Precipitous Cleft Peak in Gammon Ranges
Published in The Advertiser, Saturday 12th June 1948, page 6
By Warren Bonython
The arboreal sentries on the ruined battlements of Cleft Peak in the Gammon Ranges had beckoned with their gnarled fingers to me during the months since the time when they had mocked my party in defeat on the northern ramparts last year.
Their summons had come, unseen but far from unfelt, through the four hundred miles of South Australian air to urge me on to another attempt.
Through how many years had those gaunt watchers and their message gone unknown and unheeded? Through how many ages had Cleft Peak stood there towering up into the Gammon grandeur, its eastern wall reddening with fire from the first rays of morning light, and casting its sombre shadow across the great chasm on the west until the sun had risen high into the sky?
Perhaps its call had not been felt until the winter 1946 when a party of three of us saw Cleft Peak from the high ridges to the north-east. It rose from the chaos of the eastern Gammon Ranges, not outsoaring the summits that swept in a great crescent round it, but standing alone in character with its sheer and forbidding precipices of ruddy sandstone and its narrow, shaggy head.
E. L. D. White, a member of the party, on the summit of Cleft Peak.
Accident soon terminated the venture of that small group of three, but in the following winter another party of four of us were again in the Ranges, and we made an attempt to climb Cleft Peak on the very last day of our trip.
We were turned back on the tottering North Ridge by the dangerously loose rock after reaching to close under the North Shoulder. Lack of time prevented our seeking alternative ways of reaching the top. A further party planned to approach the summit from the south in May this year.
There had been no really good view of the southern end of Cleft Peak on previous trips, so there was some uncertainty about the southern approaches. The position as I saw it was that the North Ridge was not practicable, the eastern face was probably unclimbable, and so was the western face except possibly where a steep slope climbed up from narrow Cleft Saddle which marked the south end of the Cleft—the great fissure dividing Cleft Peak from its lesser counterpart to the west.
The top of Cleft Peak was in the shape of a long, narrow triangle dipping slightly towards the east, its base forming the eastern edge. At either end of this base were the North and South Shoulders. The South Shoulder seemed from photographs to be abrupt, like the North Shoulder. The apex of the triangle was on the western side and closer to the northern end of the base. This was the summit of Cleft Peak, which I had fixed by survey at 2,730 feet above sea level.
Beyond the South Shoulder was a saddle and then a triple-crested ridge which, because of the resemblance, I provisionally called the Cockscomb.
It seemed that an approach might be made to Cleft Peak from the south by traversing the Cockscomb ridge and the saddle and climbing the South Shoulder to the easy summit slopes. It remained to be seen whether the South Shoulder was as difficult as the north one. I was unable to determine if possible routes existed on the south-west side of the peak between Cleft Saddle and the South Shoulder.
A plan was made for our party to come up the south fork of the Italowie Creek to the large S-bend where it wound past the mouth of the gully leading up to Cleft Saddle. From there the possibilities of the south-western side of the peak could be examined.
The party left Adelaide on May 8. On the morning of May 11 the four of us. E. L. D. White, Paul and Peter Stops and I, stood in the creek bed in the cold shadow of the Cockscomb. The first two had come from Melbourne for the attempt, while Peter Stops had temporarily left his legal practice in Hobart after listening to my eulogies of the Gammon Ranges. The enthusiasm of these three to see the top of Cleft Peak was scarcely less than mine.
The Cockscomb was partly obscured by frowning lower cliffs, and we looked up towards Cleft Peak itself—rather unimpressive from here. A ridge was seen to mount up to below the South Shoulder from the bed of the steep gully before us. This was rocky, sparsely covered with spinifex and odd shrubs, and seemed climbable.
We looked at our aneroid, which showed a height of 1,570 feet above sea level, and started forward. We carried little with us—a coil of rope, food, water and cameras. We picked our way up the steeply-rising creek over tumbled, angular boulders, and past pines with their knotted trunks and blackboys with their graceful fingers pointing skyward. We reached the foot of the selected ridge and started up.
The going, if rough, was comparatively easy, for in the next half hour we climbed 700 feet. We joined the main south ridge between the South Shoulder and the Cockscomb Saddle. Soon a grand view opened out before us to the east, with Lake Frome in the distance.
We were now close under the South Shoulder. In a few minutes we reached its foot and found it to be a steep rock step only some twenty feet high. It could be turned quite easily to the left where a rocky slope dotted with clumps of spinifex offered several routes up through breaches in the south-western scarp to the summit triangle.
We were soon standing above the Shoulder. All that remained was a joyful saunter up the gentle slope to the summit through the numerous and quite sizeable trees which were now less sentry-like and seemed to welcome us.
We reached the top at 11 o’clock. Here we sat on a flat stone pavement and ate an early lunch. Last year we had come to climb Cleft Peak expecting success and meeting failure. This year we had come prepared for difficulty and had found none. The castle had proved impregnable to frontal assault, but when approach had been made to the postern gate it had been found wide open. The rope, which we had carried for a day and a half, and which, incidentally, we were fated to carry unused for three more days, had not been needed.
Where we sat on the summit, trees obscured the views to the north and south, but to the west the great arc of the Gammon Range plateau curved round, hazy blue on its scrubby top, with the red of the sandstone breaking through below and then predominating as the slopes steepened into cliffs. The thousand foot gulf of the Cleft yawned at our feet, with the lower, western wall rising beyond.
A glimpse down over the North Shoulder to the scene of last year’s failure did not alter the impression then gained of its difficult and dangerous nature.
We returned to the summit and prepared a small cairn of stones in which we placed the aluminium container with the record of our visit. We left at noon and retraced our steps to the South Shoulder. Here the three ragged crests of the Cockscomb tempted us to find a route down that way instead of by the way we had come.
The passage over the shattered rocks of the narrow saddle and the Cockscomb presented no difficulty, and from the southmost summit a long ridge dropping towards the east led us once more to the creek and to our camp.
The South Shoulder of Cleft Peak seen from the saddle below it.
