Around Mount Alexandra

I'm trying to keep jogging along the top of a road cut above the Hume Highway my feet on a mesh basket filled with rocks and the roar of Christmas holiday traffic assaulting my ears from 30 metres below. I would hate to topple down here; my head would be squashed like a ripe watermelon under the wheels of a speeding car, piloted by a hung-over, hypoglycemic father who already wishes the kids were back at school.

Why am I even here? This was supposed to be a training jog up and over Mount Alexandra, along the Nattai River, and back over Mount Alexandra all on tracks. Somehow, as so often seems to happen, I've been lured off the map, off the track, bashing through the bush because I don't want to go back.

Katoomba Lookout

It's surprisingly easy to find yourself off the map in the bush reserves around the Southern Highlands. I don't understand it. The little towns along this stretch of the Hume Highway must be wealthy – houses sell for millions of dollars - but the local reserves and parks are poorly maintained, ill-signed, and generally unloved. The district tourist information office does not even have a map of the local area tracks, focusing instead on pimping food, wine, and consumer goods in a nation where too many people are overfat and drowning in debt. As usual, money trumps everything.

But I am both figuratively and literally off track. From Lake Alexandra, I followed a bush track (if you look carefully you will find a broken down sign pointing to the Boulder Valley track on the uphill side of the fire road that heads west from Leopold Lane) uphill to the rounded top of Mount Alexandra. If you plan on coming down this track from Katoomba Lookout, watch carefully as there is no sign and only a fallen down cairn among greenery to mark the track. The Boulder Track joins a fire road that leads from the upper parking lot to Katoomba Lookout, but I turned right, away from the lookout, and jogged down to the upper parking lot.

Tunnel

A signed! track (“coke tunnel”) runs straight down the east slope of Mount Alexandra after passing through a coke tunnel. This track is very steep, eroded and joins the northern end of Leopold Street down near a tributary of the Nattai River.

I followed this fire road north to the 60 Foot Falls fire road junction where I stupidly took the verbiage on the sign “No Through Track” as literal truth and ended up followed Leopold Street to its terminus beside a big talus field above the Hume Highway. No problem, climbing over a fence I could see a bit of a track traversing the talus so I kept going. I knew from a previous trip that another steep track came down the NW ridge of Mount Alexandra to Gibbergunyah Creek which was only a kilometre away.

Then, the track and the talus ended and I was on the road cut above the Hume Hwy. Contouring west I found a steep paved drainage gully which I slithered down until I emerged on the Hume Highway. Gibbergunyah Creek bridge was now a mere 100 metres away so I jogged along the highway to that, but, the highway bridge is about 70 metres above the creek and the track under the bridge with no easy or even safe way down.

Heading back, I found another drainage gully this time heading uphill and west, so I scrambled along that until it ended, then headed into the scrappy bush. Some easy bushwacking, a clamber over a fallen down fence and I was on the track that comes over Mount Alexandra. I had not previously been right down to Gibbergunyah Creek so I hiked down the steep, but constructed track to the fire road where I even found a sign. From there, it was a simple matter to hike back up the track past Katoomba Lookout and back down the Boulder Valley Track.