Heavy dew started at 5.00 pm, darkness fell at 5.30 pm, and by 6.00 pm we were in the tent for the night, the long night. I had forgotten how lengthy nights are in the Australian winter. Not as protracted as a Canadian winter, where the sun sets at 4.30 pm and does not reappear until 7.30 am, but long enough.
We were not quite where we had planned, but Budawang adventures seldom go according to plan. The scrub is notoriously dense, the wilderness designation means there is little to no track maintenance, up-to-date information is rare. Despite all the "hashtag" adventurers, most people who visit the Budawangs take one of a few standard routes leaving most of the wilderness area untouched.
My plan, which was too ambitious for both our bodies and the track conditions, was to walk from the Clyde River to Little Forest Plateau and back via a clockwise circle taking in Rusden Head, Florence Head, Wombat Ridge, Kingiman Ridge and Jindelara Creek.
That was the plan, and then there was reality. It is a direct and steep hike up the Bridle Fire Trail to Longfella Pass and the elevated plateau that runs from Pigeon House Mountain to Rusden Head. For the first six kilometres, the trail is open and easily followed. At the top of Longfella Pass there is a good view of Clyde Gorge and the peaks around Monolith Valley with Byangee Walls and The Castle prominent in the foreground.
North of Pigeon House Mountain we found a string of pink flagging tape marking the old track up the north side of Pigeon House and, although we have been up numerous times before, we decided to detour to the top via this alternate route. The old track basically goes straight uphill until it reaches the cliffs at the top at which point we circled anti-clockwise at the base of the cliffs until we came to the tourist ladders and were soon on top with a surprising number of people.
Back at our packs, we had lunch before continuing for another kilometre before we reached a junction. Wombat Ridge track forks left and is partially overgrown but passable with some pushing through scratchy burnt shrubs. Beyond the junction with the old Landslide Creek track, however, Wombat Ridge is heavily overgrown. At one section, we lost the track altogether and were pushing through tightly packed regrowth draped with tenacious vines. Progress slowed exponentially.
After a particularly bad bit of bush-thrashing, we decided to note where we were and proceed for half an hour so we could gauge our pace. We had four kilometres of trail and an equivalent number of kilometres of bush-whacking before we could even begin looking for one of the passes up onto Rusden Head. These passes are infrequently transited and we knew it would take time to find them. Then, of course, we would have to find a camp-site and water before darkness.
On our timed section, our pace improved as the track became clearer as the soil became poorer and we were managing about a kilometre in half an hour. Still, at this rate, we would be high on Wombat Ridge when light ran out with no flat ground and no water. I knew that there was a small dam along the ridge and this had always been the back-up camp option so we continued on until we arrived at what actually turned out to be a very pleasant camp site with views of Rusden and Florence Heads, Pigeon House Mountain and fresh water from the dam.
We had a much earned cup of tea and snack and then leaving Doug to put the tent up I headed off downhill to the east to scope out a route into Jindelara Creek. The topographic map shows small cliffs along several sections of Jindelara Creek but there are many more cliffs than shown and I had to traverse a distance before I found a pass down to the creek. I took a way point and then high tailed it back to camp to arrive just as dusk was settling in. All in all, the bush was not too bad, a somewhat misleading sample as it would turn out.
We had a damp night owing to heavy dew and a three season fully mesh tent, so I boiled water for coffee and porridge whilst still sitting in the tent doorway. Then we packed up and put on waterproof jackets for the very wet walk down to Jindelara Creek. Instead of simply turning around and walking back out, we had decided to at least walk some of the way out along Jindelara Creek. In theory, you could walk all the way down Jindelara Creek to where Pigeon House Fire Trail crosses the creek but we knew that would be very slow.
I had marked the spot where I had intersected the road the night before after coming up from the pass to Jindelara Creek so we headed downhill from there but somehow ended up downstream of the pass and had to travel further downstream again until we could find a pass that went right the way to the creek. Above the creek there are tiers of short cliffs and a pass must be found through each one.
When we reached the creek it was pretty walking: deep clear pools, short bluffs mostly along the east side of the creek, some flat rock slabs, but, as always in this kind of terrain, slow. There were piles of flood damaged trees stacked up from recent heavy rains and floods and we often had to scramble up above piles of timber then return back down to the creek.
After we had been walking for about two hours we stopped for a short break before continuing on. The creek narrowed abruptly ahead and several large fallen trees made for even slower more arduous travel. I managed to scrape my way through by climbing 30 metres up then descending again to the creek where I confronted flood timber stacked about four metres high along the steep banks of the creek.
This, we decided was far enough in the creek so we scrambled uphill quickly finding an easy pass through the cliffs above to a tributary creek flowing over sandstone where we filled our water bottles. Taking a compass bearing from our approximate location, a west-northwesterly bearing would intersect Wombat Ridge Fire Trail. And thus we embarked on some of the worst bushwacking I have encountered, and I have bushwacked through the Monashees!
Regrowth was spaced approximately a nanometre apart, well over head high and overlain with 45 metre long intertwined tendrils of vine with the tensile strength of graphene. As we moved forward - walking is not an appropriate term - our bodies would be draped about with vines reminiscent of Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the songs of the Sirens. The only way to progress forward was to hurl your body against these binding vines until they finally gave way with such abruptness that, had there been a nanometre of space, we would have been thrown to the ground. As it was literally impossible to fall over, we would simply stagger forward into the next carapace of vines.
Eventually, after I had lost a hat and had a bandage stripped from my hands, and Doug's trousers were in tatters, we erupted onto Wombat Ridge trail and collapsed onto the ground for lunch. Disturbingly, when we checked our position on the map, although we had walked down Jindelara Creek for some distance and bush-whacked for two kilometres through green hell, we were less than a kilometre from where we had camped.
Unfortunately, we had one more section of thick viney regrowth on the way back where we completely lost the old road and ended up once more hurling ourselves against the resistance of the graphene vines before we somehow stumbled on the old road bed again.
At Longfella Pass we stopped for a rest overlooking Clyde Gorge and the main peaks of the Budawangs thinking that we had only an easy three kilometre walk down the fire trail to our car. I drank the remainder of my water before we left. Upon reaching a fire trail junction, we checked the map and confirmed, yes, we should go left and headed steeply downhill on a fire trail that looked increasingly unfamiliar to me. After we had descended perhaps a 100 metres (vertical) I called ahead to Doug and rechecking the map noted that we had been sucked into turning left when we should have gone right as the track junction shown on the map is not quite a four way. Back uphill we went, my tongue now stuck to the roof of my mouth with thirst. Right, then left, and then down and finally the Clyde River and our car.
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