Back to The Budawangs: Profile Rock Hill and Yurnga Lookout

Once. One time. Numero uno. That’s how many times I’ve carried an overnight pack in the last year. It’s just over one year since I almost died from an anaphylactic reaction to a tick bite and, with ticks being endemic over much of eastern Australia, I’ve had to change my bushwalking habits just to stay alive. Some places, I simply don’t go anymore, other places I go with (what I consider) extreme precautions – 80% Deet from head to toe (including in my hair), permethrine treated clothing (long sleeves, long pants tucked into socks) and backpacks, and I avoid bushwacking as a general rule as that increases my chances of picking up one or more of the small but deadly parasites. Cautiously, however, I decided to take my chances on an overnight bushwalk into the Budawangs. I’ve done a lot of bushwacking in the Budawangs and I’ve never got a tick, but they are there – recent reports from volunteers working on the old northern trail up Didthul confirmed the presence of ticks. I was hopeful, however, that if we walked into the higher elevation areas of the Budawangs from further inland, I might be safe.

Doug came along. I’m never sure these days if he comes because he wants to or because he is afraid I’ll die somewhere in the bush after getting a tick bite and not getting epinephrine quickly enough. Certainly, if I am out bush for a long time – a not uncommon occurrence – I’ll frequently get a text from him checking to make sure I’m still conscious!

We decided to walk into the Burrumbeet valley and camp by Burrumbeet Brook. We thought this trail would be mostly free of overhanging vegetation, the campsite is open without dense vegetation, there’s a pleasant stream running right by camp and a toilet. For those that like camping caves, there are plenty of those as well. I’ve walked in this way multiple times in the past and it is one of the easier ways into the heart of the Budawangs as the trail has little elevation gain and is reasonable (by Budawang standards). I had hopes of getting up on top of Mount Bibbenluke and Profile Rock Hill. Once upon a time I had a plan to climb all the Budawang peaks but, in the absence of another massive bushfire, I’ve given that up. The Budawang bush is back, probably worse than it was before the 2020 fires and with the increased possibility of getting tick bites and the general suffering involved in trying to penetrate the scrub, the appeal of that goal has declined precipitously.

The walk into camp went smoothly enough except that Doug accidentally walked up and over Corang Peak while I took the track that skirts around the east side. There is a good view from the top of Corang Peak as the vegetation has not got too high yet but the first time I went up Corang Peak in 2012 the bush was so high and dense that there really was no view even if you climbed atop the cairn. We found a good camp beside Burrumbeet Brook, put the tent up and made a lovely large jug of tea to accompany lunch. I had carried a camp chair in so that I did not have to sit on the ground and possibly encounter ticks, which was a pleasant but heavy luxury!

In the afternoon, we walked back along the track to a saddle south of Profile Rock Hill where we traversed easily (the bush was reasonably open) along the eastern side of Profile Rock Hill until we were able to walk to the top avoiding the cliffs that line the south side of the hill. The top is (at this time) only lightly vegetated and provides good views.

Next morning after the requisite jug of coffee, we packed up for a day walk to Mount Bibbenluke. The track beyond Burrumbeet campsite is considerably rougher than the section out to Wog Wog. The vegetation is thicker and beginning to ingress onto the trail much as it did before the fires, the track is heavily eroded into a deep channel, and the presence of 30 cm high boards across the trail (presumably originally designed to manage water flow) makes walking along the trail a mini-obstacle course. As we got near to Mount Bibbenluke, the scrub got thicker and denser. In parts, it was a complete wall of thick, spiky, virtually impenetrable scrub. By the time we got to the spot we had picked out from the map as a possible route up, we had gone completely off the idea of thrashing through bush to gain the upper plateau which looked as scrubby as the valley.

Instead, we walked across to what is now known as Bibbenluke camp which I have always called Corang camp as it is at the start of the Corang River (this camp is named Bibbenluke camp on the map at the trail head). The camp looked much as it had when we camped here in 2012. On the way back to camp we found the trail up to Yurnga Lookout. I do not remember this track from 2012 but it appeared some time after the fires. I bashed up to the cliffs just south of Yurnga Lookout in 2019 on a solo trip around the Corang circuit. At that time, the track up the valley to Bibbenluke camp was hellishly overgrown and it was almost indistinguishable from just bushwacking. The Yurnga track now is pretty clear – take the lower (left) turn at a fork which although it looks as if it descends actually leads to a good lookout on slabs and pagodas.

After sitting about at the lookout for a while we walked back to camp for tea. At around 5:00 pm, a large group of youth (presumably school students) walked past and camped somewhere past us (possibly the camp caves) from whence they proceeded to make an outrageous amount of noise.

On the third day we walked out taking the Canowie Brook/CorangRiver route. The track is reasonably well walked in but can be tricky to follow in a few locations. Notably, at the first fork when one trail goes up and one goes down, follow the uphill track unless you want to visit the cascades. If you choose the lower fork, you will eventually have to walk uphill to join the through trail which traverses the slope about 30 metres above the river. At Broula Brook, it is easy to miss the trail which heads out of the creek slightly upstream from the campsite (nice campsites here).

Corang lagoon is off limits now and a fence marks the private property line. I believe that people are still accessing the lagoon via the north side of the river which is national park (check the Bushwalk forum or the Facebook group). There is a good track that follows the fence line to Goodsell Creek where the new route joins the old track. The new route climbs up and down multiple times, never very big elevation gains but enough to feel a wee bit tiring (at least if you are as out of shape at pack carrying as me). At Goodsell Creek, the regrowth is very, very thick and we lost the trail for a bit but managed to locate it by backtracking and following the eastern most tributary of Goodsell Creek for a short distance until the track climbs up a small ridge. There is a bit of pink flagging but it is easy to miss. The remainder of the trail is clear. The walk out took us almost an hour longer than the walk in. I suffered along walking in long pants and a long sleeve shirt until we got to the main trail junction (I hate walking in excessive clothing) and had sweat running profusely down my arms and legs. The final four kilometres of the trail is very clear and I felt eminently better once I changed into shorts and a tee-shirt.

Whales, The Sea and Me

It’s a drizzly grey morning with a ten knot ESE wind blowing and a surprisingly lumpy sea atop a 1.5 metre southerly swell. I’ve been paddling for about an hour and I’m just a few hundred metres east of Black Rock. There is no-one around, and with waves washing across my deck it’s one of those paddles when the sea feels dangerous and lonely and exhilarating all at the same time.

PC: Nick B.

As I head back north around a headland, the swell picks up and the kayak surges forward, still no people, no boats, nobody but grey ocean and grey sky blending together on the horizon. And then I hear it, the familiar slap, slap, slap, and turning to the east, far off, I see a faint spout. Whales. I paddle northeast, the plumb bow of my kayak slapping over the waves. The whales are moving south, noisily, slap, slap, slap of the massive flippers on the sea. One after another, sometimes two at once, then a breach, and back to slap, slap, slap.

A half kilometre off the coast, I sit and watch. It is a mother and calf. The mother pec-slaps almost continually. Her flippers are huge, her breath noisy. The calf breaches, once, twice, fully out of the water showing a white, ridged underbelly. Me and the whales and the ceaseless shifting ocean.

A Century in Exile

After a century in the political wilderness¹, the Conservative Party has won the provincial election in British Columbia coming away with 64 seats and 48% of the popular vote. Despite very low voter turnout (around 47%), the party’s share of the popular vote increased 5% against an 8 % decline for the incumbent NDP (New Democrat Party). The Greens (a minor party in Canadian politics) picked up 3% against the 2024 election but remained firmly anchored at just two seats.

David Eby, (now former) leader of the NDP and deposed Premier of BC, called the election two years early when the Opposition Party (Conservatives) were in some disarray. This is a dirty trick, even for politics, which nevertheless spectacularly back-fired, although the NDP did post on X on Saturday night a congratulatory tweet to Eby for retaining his seat proving once again that the left has simply become impossible to parody (Eby won a seat and lost an election).

On “the socials” NDP supporters are, of course, struggling to cope and delivering up implausible explanations for why the NDP lost. Among people I used to know while living in BC, the most popular explanation is some kind of tortuous strangulation of voting numbers noting that less people voted for the Conservatives in 2026 than 2024 (currently 49,895 less). What is omitted from this explanation is that the NDP recorded 274,678 less votes than 2024. In other words, the NDP lost 5.5 times as many absolute voter numbers than the Conservatives.

The rise of the Conservative vote in BC, which has long been Canada’s most left leaning province is startling. In 2020, the Conservatives ran 19 candidates across 87 ridings and garnered a paltry 1.9% of the vote. Under the leadership of John Rustad (previously a Liberal MLA) from regional BC (inland northwest) the Conservatives rocketed up to garner 43% of the popular vote and 44 seats. In terms of vote share, the Conservatives were barely behind the NDP with 43% of the popular vote versus 45% for the NDP, a very thin margin on which to call an early election.

Lorne Doerkson, the new leader of the Conservatives, is similar in many respects to Rustad. He is a middle aged white guy (biologically immutable facts which are sure to raise ire if not hatred among the left). Doerkson is also from regional BC (Cariboo-Chilcotin) and was originally elected as a Liberal in 2020 before joining the Conservatives in 2024 and, like the rodeo rider he once was, he has come out of the gate fighting with commitments to reduce taxes, move from the so called “safe supply” of addictive drugs to a treatment based model, and boost energy production, among other economic and developmental goals.

This will be a shock for BC and particularly the elite professional class which like all developed nations skews highly left. Among University Professors, for example, around 90% of the staff are “progressives”. I’ve put progressive in quotation marks as there is nothing progressive about allowing people to die like vermin on the streets from drug overdoses. Under the NDP’s “harm reduction” policies (modelled on failed policies from California and Oregon), more people died from drug overdoses than Covid during the peak of the Covid years, and the leading cause of death among those aged 10 to 59 remains drug toxicity. Repeal of some of the more “progressive” drug policies – which even Eby admitted had been unsuccessful – resulted in a 21% decrease in drug deaths over two years. A significant improvement which, nevertheless, was interpreted by proponents of “harm reduction” as caused by something else, proving once again that hard data is never enough to over-come ideology. I’m not sure whether it’s ironic or evil to continue advocating for policies that cause more people to die (often young people) simply to prove yourself “empathetic,” but I strongly suspect it is the latter.

At the end of the day, public policy has to be driven by what works (preferably backed by hard data) not what makes the policy pundits feel good or what my more cynical self might call a desire to be seen to be empathetic and caring amongst one’s social group. Politically, I am neither left nor right. I believe in using all the available data (which includes a basic understanding of human nature) to make our best decisions. Decisions based on the “feels” so often have tragic consequences because emotions are transient and frequently unconnected to reality. Avi Lewis, the head of the Federal NDP, posted a typically emotional response on X where he urged “progressive organizers” to “feel all the feelings.” Unfortunately, it’s the “feelings” that resulted in a resounding failure for the NDP despite overwhelming evidence that the voter base was shifting. The time for feelings is over. Progressives need to put on their 2SLGBTQIA+ panties and focus on facts.

1The Conservative Party last had a majority government in 1928.

A Big Week

To shuck the chains of uniformity and conformity each of us must first brave the wilderness alone. Mark Twight.

On Saturday, after a very full training week I got up at 5:15 am and drank a couple of large mugs of coffee before getting on my bicycle and riding the trails up to the Mogo trig station for my volunteer shift with Sea Otter. Although I’ve ridden up there dozens of times, I wasn’t exactly sure how long it took so the previous Saturday I’d ridden up and timed myself: 58 minutes (including faffing around in the garage but all my times include faffing around in the garage) going via the trails from Curtis Road. On Saturday, I was whipped so I took a short cut which didn’t decrease the elevation gain but did reduce the riding by 1 or 1.5 kilometres. It still took me almost an hour (57 minutes including the garage faffing) and it felt hard. I think my heart rate was just as pegged as the previous day.

On Friday, Doug and I had done the second downwinder of the week with Quick Nick and, although it was windier and the waves better developed it was hard work, and my heart rate was pegged at maximum on the return trip. I wouldn’t normally plan two high intensity days like that in a heavy training week but the purpose of training is to do fun and challenging stuff not just get better at training, so when the night before text came from Quick Nick, it was easy to say “I’m in.”

On Thursday, I had done one of my standby hills trails – about 600 metres gain in the 12 kilometre return trip. Not ideal, but only a half hour drive and the hills are steep enough to constitute a reasonable workout. I stayed a nose breathing pace the entire way as Tuesday was an upwind/downwind run and on Monday we had racked up 1000 metres gain in 20 kilometres on Mount Gulaga. Gulaga is only about 700 metres gain from Tilba so we also walked down and back up the northerly route (a steep fire trail) to bump the elevation gain up to 1000 metres. One thousand metres gain used to be our ski-touring minimum when we lived in the West Kootenay. While in Australia, I have to go up and down and up and down to get 1000 metres.

On top of all of this was my weight training sessions and climbing on our home climbing wall. It was a helluva week and come time to ride home on Saturday from my Sea Otter shift I was feeling pretty weary. Getting back from the Trig after my shift ended involved more up and down than I had anticipated as so many trails were closed for racing but I finally found myself at the top of Devil is the Temptor and I bombed back home. There had been an accident (there’s always a crash) and racing had been suspended while the victim was cleared which meant I could sneak up a couple of the race trails.

The riders seemed to really enjoy the trails whether or not they were racing which was really awesome to see. I’ve got a bit of home town pride about our 125 kilometres of trail. There is definitely a sex divide in mountain bike racing at least in the Enduro series which includes a lot of black descents. There was about 80 male participants versus 10 female riders. Make of that what you will.

The Boys Are Back in Town: Upwind Downwind

Guess who just got back today

Them wild-eyed boys that had been away

Thin Lizzy. The Boys Are Back in Town.

It feels like a couple of years since we’ve regularly paddled with Quick Nick. Used to be, when the summer northeasterlies were blowing, a text would arrive at 8:00 pm the night before suggesting a 1:00 or 2:00 pm start the next day to paddle from our home beach across the Bay to North Head. By this time in the afternoon, the wind was at it’s acme, and the 6 or 7 kilometres to North Head would take well over an hour as our kayaks got airborne over steep wind waves which we hit within 100 metres of leaving the beach. If we were going well with a 20+ knot tailwind, we might reach our home bay in around 40 minutes or occasionally, even less on the downwind leg, although neither the outward nor the inward journey were without significant effort.

The summer northeasterlies are back, and, after Doug and Nick had an epic run on the weekend I was in Canberra, I was keen to get back out there for the summer huck-a-lung contest (which I never win). I invited Robbie and Rae, but only Robbie attended, admitting later that he wasn’t sure what a “downwinder” entailed but he is always happily up for an adventure.

I had set the departure time at noon, but both Doug and Nick suggested an earlier meeting time. In a strange way, I’ve always enjoyed the hard work of plugging across the Bay into a stiff wind. There’s something reassuring about knowing that if you keep your mind under control - and it’s always your mind not your body whichwants to stop - you can reach your destination. But I relented, and suggested we depart at 10:30 am instead. Leaving our Bay, the wind was only about 15 knots but it built as we headed northeast. Robbie had drifted far north across the Bay. I assumed he was in a futile search for shelter but no such cover from the wind exists and our strategy has always been just to paddle directly into the wind.

We considered having a quick stop on North Head Beach but didn’t (we should have). I felt warmed up from the paddle over and didn’t want to break the rhythm of paddling but a half hour delay would have allowed the wind and following sea to build a bit higher. From North Head we paddled out until we would have a direct line back to our bay. Nick gave Robbie directions on what to aim for, demonstrating that some people are just good leaders whether or not the group has a designated leader. Starting off, the three of us in plumb bow kayaks and knowing the drill which is essentially paddle as if you are being pursued by a hungry great white shark, Robbie was quickly at the back of the pack. With a bit of wobbling, the sea was pretty big and steep off North Head, Robbie got his sail up and, with paddling he moved from the back of the pack to the front of the pod.

As usual, I brought up the rear. There is simply no way I can compete with men who are bigger and stronger than me (younger too) but I’ve been a female in male dominated sports my entire life and you learn that whining is pointless and the only thing that will give you an advantage is tenacity and hard work. We were 43 minutes back to the Bay. I caught some good waves, the few seconds of rest I got as the kayak surged ahead on a good runner felt like extra oxygen on Everest. Robbie had fun and expressed an interest in coming again, and Doug and Nick, to my surprise, found the waves challenging to catch. Puffing along at the back, it always seems to me that Doug and Nick, who get rests while they wait for me, aren’t working that hard, so it’s always a slight boon to find out that they were working too. According to my Garmin watch, I spent about an hour and a half at either threshold (zone 4) or above (zone 5). I’m not sure I’ve ever accomplished that before!

Didthul and The Base

Training for mountains and big elevation gain when you don’t live near any mountains has always been a challenge. Some people resort to inclined treadmills, some to step-ups or weighted step-ups, others to hill repeats on whatever small hill is readily available, or if you live in a tall apartment block, going up and down the stairs is a reasonable but not perfect proxy. I’ve done the latter, when I lived in Calgary almost forty years ago. It was boring, a bit smelly and slightly creepy in a 1970’s horror flick kind of way. There’s nothing really scary happening but you always feel it could. Calgary, of course, has access to real mountains if you can drive an hour or more each way, but, when you are trying to find elevation in the middle of the work week, Calgary is dispiritingly flat.

Treadmills are a poor proxy. Most can only be jacked to about 15 degrees which isn’t steep at all, the belt moves under you which makes the movement easier, and mountains do not have handily smooth and even surfaces. Step ups suffer from the same problems – the height is uniform, the platform smooth and instead of stepping down forwards you step down backwards and yet no-one walks down a mountain backwards. I should say, almost no-one because on a trip to the New Denver Glacier to climb three peaks (Mount Denver, Iron and English Peaks) in 2011 a young woman with rheumatoid arthritis who had joined us walked down the trail backwards at the end of the trip because her knees were so painful.

Small hills do not replicate long hills because if you only have to gain and lose 150, 200 or even 300 metres of elevation gain at a time, the legs get a rest from either the up or the down every half to one hour. That also does not replicate long mountain days where you gain and lose 1,500 metres or more of elevation all in one go. The best we flat-landers can do is make do with what we have close by.

Last time I was training for elevation gain was 2018 before we went back to Canada for five months in 2019. I had a spreadsheet where I calculated the elevation gain against the drive time so I could identify the best local (within about an hour) hills to gain elevation. All of them were on fire trails as we don’t have any trails within an hour that have decent elevation gain. Fire trails are dull to walk up and down but so are trails once you’ve done them a time or two. But, as Mike Tysen said “discipline is doing what you hate to do, but none the less doing it like you love it.”

A bit over an hour of driving for me, is the Didthul (Pigeon House) Mountain trail which gains about 500 metres in around 5 or 6 kilometres. That’s still not that steep, and the trail, because it is so popular, is over-engineered so it’s not good training for rough surfaces but it is a trail and not a fire road and there is a good view at the top. I’ve been up Didthul four times now. Once was a long, long time ago with my Mum, once was in 2016 before the trail had been upgraded to its current highway status, and once, in 2021, we walked up from north on a very old trail which was heavily overgrown after the bushfires.

In 2016, we walked up and down Didthul in two hours – 1:15 up and 45 minutes down – on the old and perfectly good trail. This time we got to the lookout at the top in 1:25 which is not bad given a decade has passed and the trail is longer now as it is has such an easy gradient on the lower part. If you’ve been up Didthul before, you know that there is a couple of hundred metres of elevation gain and then about a kilometre of flat plateau before the final 300 metres to the top – all of which is very sturdy steps now. We did the top part twice so our elevation gain for the day was close to 800 metres. My legs were getting sore from the eccentric loading on the last set of stairs – which is the reason I search out elevation gain – but it was my feet which were most sore. I made the mistake of wearing a pair of Keen hiking boots someone had given me and the soles were thin and soft.

That is the first week of my base period done. Garmin – which gets many things wrong (my elevation gain on my surf day at Cullendulla was 762 metres!) had my kilometres at 78 (0.49) for the week over 13 hours (but that doesn’t include strength or climbing wall training).

Surf Surprises

Summer is the time for surf kayaking and down-winders, this morning I had no expectation of either, but I found myself catching a series of small but very fun waves near Square Head at Cullendulla. Last Saturday, we paddled over to the Batemans Bay bar expecting some good rides only to find that despite an outgoing tide (with a rapid current running), the bar was more like a tidal rapid than a nice series of green waves we could catch. Today, as I wandered north past Snapper Island and over to Square Head, I noticed a nice little wave coming into the mouth of Cullendulla Creek. I kept going and paddled past Hawks Nest Headland thinking I would catch a wave of two on the way back if the waves were still good.

Although the tide was rising, the waves were surprisingly good and I was catching runs that were over 300 metres long! It’s hard to predict when the main bar on the Clyde River or this little bar at the mouth of Cullendulla Creek will be good. Cullendulla normally needs a big southeasterly swell to be good – 4 or 5 metres on the Batemans Bay wave buoy and a tide that is not too high. The Batemans Bay bar is more forgiving, you can often find good waves with as little as two metres on the Batemans Bay wave buoy especially if the swell is easterly. A falling tide helps stand the waves up and makes the paddle back out easier but we have had good sessions with a rising tides as the waves sometimes stay greener for longer.

If the conditions are right, the Cullendulla bar is excellent for beginners. The waves are generally widely spaced and even. A capsize is easily managed even if the paddler cannot roll. The Batemans Bay bar can be more challenging for less competent paddlers as there are often (almost always) many lines of breaking waves. This means you can have really long rides (up to half a kilometre) by jumping from one wave to another but a capsize can also be much more challenging to manage if the paddler cannot roll. 

One of my kayaking friends who came out of her kayak on the Batemans Bay bar had a terrible time being battered in the surf before she was finally extricated. On the other hand, we’ve had a few capsizes which were easy to manage even though the paddler could not roll or missed their roll. My nephew came out on the Cullendulla bar on a day when the Batemans Bay bar was recording a four metre swell, but he is young and agile and had leapt back in his boat before either Doug or I got to him. I’ve never swum on either bar but it’s probably just a matter of time until I get dumped on the Batemans Bay bar.