Totem Pole, Tasmania
Totem Pole
Interesting facts
- The first free ascent was made by Doug McConnell and Dean Rollins; the free route is graded 24 on the Australian scale and climbed in two pitches.
- After Lynn Hill's fall on a broken hold, the first onsight ascent of the stack was made a few years later by Monique Forestier.
- Paul Pritchard's accident here happened on Friday 13 February 1998; he waited about eight hours on a ledge before being rescued.
- Pritchard's book The Totem Pole won the Boardman Tasker Prize and the 1999 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize.
- His return to complete the climb in 2016, 18 years after the accident, was filmed as Doing It Scared, which won numerous awards.
- Dolerite, the rock of the stack, is rare on mainland Australia, while Tasmania is famous among climbers for its tall dolerite pillars.
- The same column-forming dolerite builds the Organ Pipes on Mount Wellington above Hobart, another favourite Tasmanian climbing crag.
- The Three Capes Track, a 46 km walk opened in December 2015, passes Cape Hauy beside the Totem Pole.
Why it is worth it
The Totem Pole is a single shaft of dolerite about 65 metres tall and only a few metres across, rising straight out of the Southern Ocean beside the cliffs of Cape Hauy on Tasmania's Tasman Peninsula. It is a remarkably slender stack, and it looks almost impossibly fragile against the swell that breaks around its base. Next to it stands a second stack, the Candlestick.
The stack belongs to the dolerite coast of Tasman National Park, proclaimed in 1999, where columnar cliffs rise to around 300 metres above the sea and rank among the highest of their kind in the world. Dolerite is a volcanic rock that cooled slowly from molten magma, contracting into tall, many-sided columns; the sea, wind and salt have worked along these joints, isolating columns from the cliff until one stood alone. Cape Hauy, Cape Pillar and the Tasman Arch are all part of the same coastline.
The Totem Pole is famous among climbers worldwide. John Ewbank and Allan Keller made the first ascent in 1968 using aid, and the line was later climbed free; from the summit climbers return to the mainland on a Tyrolean traverse, a rope stretched across the gap. In 1998 the British climber Paul Pritchard was badly injured when a dislodged rock struck his head; his partner ran about 8 km to Fortescue Bay to raise help, and Pritchard came back in 2016 to complete the ascent. The American climber Lynn Hill also attempted an onsight climb of the stack and fell when a hold broke.
Getting there
Cape Hauy is reached on foot from Fortescue Bay, inside Tasman National Park. The nearest city is Hobart, about 62 km away in a straight line, and Hobart International Airport (HBA) is about 52 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Totem Pole is a sea stack popular amongst rockclimbers in the Tasman National Park, Tasmania, Australia. It contains a number of climbing routes, all of which require a Tyrolean traverse to return to the mainland, and is famous for being the site of the 1998 accident which caused British climber Paul Pritchard's hemiplegia.
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