Well, today was the big day. It’s cloudy (as normal) but not raining. Overall, not a bad day to be outdoors, though. It’s about a 4 block walk to where you start the bridge climb.
Our tickets to the bridge climb had two times on them – 10:00 and 12:15. We assumed we were booked in for 10:00, but that wasn’t the case. Fortunately, we were early and she asked if we’d like to go on the 9:30 climb. Australians are SO polite and accommodating!
These people have this worked out. You check in, sit and watch a little video and then they take your group (about 12) back into another room. There you fill out an information form and take a breathalyzer test. Yeah, you got it – nobody has liquid courage before going up there.
After that, you’re moved into yet another room where you have to empty your pockets and are issued a jumpsuit. Our biggest concern was whether they’d make them in “American” sizes that would work for us. Yes, they do – the potential humiliation of being turned back was averted.
You go behind a curtain to change – why, I don’t know, because you put this on over your clothes – and put all your pocket stuff in a locker. You’re allowed eyeglasses or sunglasses, rings, a necklace and small earrings, but nothing else, and they enforce this with a metal detector. You can’t have bits of paper, Kleenex, or anything else in your pockets, either.
You then put on this jumpsuit (incidentally, why is it called a “jumpsuit” for a bridge climb??) that has the zipper in the back and no pockets. Again, there’s little way for you to have fished anything out even if you took it with you. Because of the weather, they also gave us rain pants and a little backpack hooked onto our fannies with a rain hoodie in it if we needed it.
The one thing we noticed was that it was all HOT. Everything was nylon and although it had little breather panels in it, it still was pretty warm, like one of those exercise suits that’s guaranteed to melt away the pounds if you just wear it a few short hours each day.
We were also issued things that you might want but couldn’t take – hats had a leash to clip to the back of your jumper, and hankies had an elastic strap on them so they went around your wrist and tucked up into your sleeve. Caps or beanies, your choice. If you wore glasses or sunglasses, they had retainers to make sure they stayed with you, too.
You then got a safety belt (again, sufficiently large) and it had this little round thing about the size of a tennis ball on it. It was fastened to a D-ring in the middle of the belt in front. Inside the “tennis ball” was two spiked wheels that acted like little turnstiles. Once this was fed onto the safety cable, it couldn’t go off until it was at the end again, and the wheels let it pass by the retainer hooks that held the cable in place.
We also were given radios so we could hear the guide. The headphones didn’t go in your ears, though, but instead rested on your face just in front of your ears and vibrated through that way. It was pretty neat, because you didn’t get cauliflower ear from the headphones.
Oh, we also put on “rain pants” over our jumpers. These were a thicker plastic than the nylon jump suits. Since there were no bathrooms from the time you filled out the paperwork until you left the bridge, though, my theory is that they had a potential dual purpose. I leave it to you to imagine what that might be.
Climbing the bridge was exciting, but not traumatic in any way. The first thing you noticed was there were no “ladders” in the conventional sense, but just a lot of very steep staircases. From the time we entered the first one until we left that same staircase, we were latched to the safety cable. After we went up about 4 of these, probably 3 stories worth, we were then on a catwalk that went up over the top of the bridge. You went up to the midpoint, then crossed over and came back down the other side parallel to what you just went up. The picture of the two of us together was taken at the top, as you crossed over from one side to the other. You could see through the catwalk down to the roadway level below. I have no idea how far it was, but in reality it didn't matter. It was a whole bunch.
Incidentally, at the peak, according to Damion (our guide, who stands about 6’6) you’d have 5.2 seconds of freefall before you hit the water. I figure that’s one, maybe 1.5 very fast “Hail Mary’s” before the splat if one were to make the jump.
At one point when we were on the return leg, we were at the “ladders” again. You have to go down these one at a time, and the person ahead of you has to have cleared to the next one before you start.
Eddie was ahead of me, and I was about ½ way down the one that’s just at roadway level when WHOOSH!!! A train came screeching by on my right hand side. It was barely gone and my heart had just switched out of passing gear when WHOOSH!!! One came from behind me going the other direction on the other side.
My theory about the dual purpose of the rain pants was almost proven.
We returned to the ground as our legs were just starting to tremble a bit. Since I couldn’t take notes, I don’t have any of the historical data that Damian gave us – you’ll just have to look it up online. The one thing I do remember is that there are over 6 million rivets, none of which have had to be replaced since construction.
Incidentally – they were installed hot, so they had these little furnaces that were up on the ironwork to heat them up. To get them to the workers timely (and hot), they threw them.
Yup, someone was employed as a “rivet catcher”. He had one piece of safety equipment – a bucket with a bit of sand in it, in which he caught the red-hot rivets. The sand was to keep them from burning through the bottom of the bucket. They estimate that about 15,000 ended up in the bottom of the river.
That’s a job that I wouldn’t want, especially when there were no safety harnesses or much else in the way of equipment to keep you from falling.
Once we were down, and through the gift shop, of course, our next order of business was lunch and a beer. That having been accomplished, we decided it’s a good afternoon to come back for a nap, having risked our lives up high and all today.
It was a great activity, and I highly recommend it to anyone who happens to come to Sydney. I don’t like high places AT ALL, but never felt any apprehension about the event. It was a spectacular view, though, that you wouldn’t get anywhere else in the world.
