Greg Sheard
(late 1960s to present)

I guess climbing’s something that gets into your blood. You always enjoy going back to it. I gave it away for 20 years and still came back to it for different reasons. It’s something about the mountain, the climb, the exposure and the enjoyment of it. I don’t make a tick list. I don’t climb to increase the grade. If a climb’s enjoyable I go and do it. It’s always something you go back to. You run into a lot of people who retire from climbing but they’ll still go and do it occasionally…For me, it’s not trad [traditional] climbing—the ultimate is the multi-pitch climb, regardless of whether it’s easy or not. It’s a different style of climbing. It’s as different from Frog Buttress as Kangaroo Point is from indoor climbing. I think the long multi-pitch climbs are the ones that offer the enjoyment that is most likely to appeal to people because you run across people who run across those climbs and they say, ‘This is great. This is not doing 22s, 23s, 24s—this is doing a 13 which is phenomenal.’

Picture: Michael Meadows collection.