Climbing Mt Woodroffe |
 This three-shot panorama – taken half-an-hour after we started out from the base of the mountain – shows both what we did and why we did it. After climbing the hillside in the previous picture, Eric and I walked down onto and across the plateau that Eric’s on in this picture. It was largely spinifex-free, which was an added bonus. We then climbed two-thirds the way up the ridge that comes down from the left-hand skyline, until we reached a point below the first band of brown rocks, when we veered right into the valley that’s still in shade in this picture. We traversed west (i.e., heading right) along the side of the valley, slowly gaining height as we moved, until we reached the main bulk of Mt Woodroffe, which dominates the right-hand half of this picture. Once we were on Woodroffe itself, we simply aimed for the skyline, which led us to the summit. We chose this route in order to avoid both the thick fields of spinifex on Woodroffe’s lower slopes (which account for the grey-green sheen on the bottom half of the peak), as well as the rocky banks criss-crossing the upper half of the mountain. |