Going Back Again

We are dirt-bagging it, sleeping in the back of our car before walking into the Deua. The windows are streaming with condensation and, it turns out, rain, and I am hunkered down, curled into a tight ball in my 30 year old down sleeping bag wearing multiple layers of clothing. It is cold and will only be colder the next night when we are sleeping in our equally decrepit but few years younger tent even though we have brought our full-on four season winter mountaineering tent from Integral Designs in Canada.

I remembered back to our last overnight bushwalking trip when I had thought: "must replace down sleeping bags, headlamps, and rain jacket" as all had pretty much blown up; and here we were in the same old gear with the same old problems just a month or two later. I remember on that last trip peaking into Alison's tent - a high end brand new ultralight tent - where she was luxuriating in deep piles of insulation like Cleopatra reclining on her many cushions. I shuffled back to our tent, 10 metres away where our down bags were worn as thin as cheap, one ply toilet paper and were about as insulating. There are benefits to not having a pathological aversion to shopping.

When I got up at first light in the morning to brew up some coffee, the mist was strikingly like rain, and, after standing outside for a few minutes while the stove boiled water, I came to the conclusion that this was indeed rain. Not fog, nor mist, nor haar, this was rain. The forecast had called for rain, but, with what Doug calls the "Sandra distortion field" in full effect, I had somehow managed to skim over that part of the forecast. Now, however, I was thinking about our rain pants, left at home because we thought we would be carrying five litres of water, and my rain jacket which had delaminated during our last trip leaving long streams of seam sealing tape hanging off in strips and about as water proof as, well, here we go again, one ply toilet paper.

We were no longer planning to carry five litres of water as the first in a series of disruptions to this trip had been finding no bridge, just a deep ford, across the initial creek. With a standard vehicle we were essentially stopped at the main road. So, we were taking, or attempting, a different route, extra water not required. Rain pants, however would have been handy. Water we would find in buckets and buckets and buckets.

Dressed in as many layers as we thought we could spare (in other words everything but a pair of long-johns and our puff jackets) we started walking along the fire trail. After about an hour, when we were modestly wet, we got to the point where we thought we should leave the fire trail and search for an old bridle track that descends deep into the Deau wilderness. Before the big fires of 2019/2020, this trail had been navigable, now with dense regrowth and little to no traffic it had completely disappeared.

The big question after the Black Summer of fires is "how dense is the regrowth?" As time passes, the regrowth gets thicker and thicker and is, in many places already virtually impenetrable. On the ridge we were descending, the impenetrable stage is still a season or two away. Come summer, with warmer weather and ample moisture in the soil, I suspect this ridge will be far worse for travel. In winter, it was not too bad, if you count a density of regrowing eucalypts at 10 per 10 square centimetres not too bad. At higher elevations, the eucalpyts were about waist high, as we got lower that moved up to chest high. Walking through, it did not really matter whether it was raining or not as we could not have got wetter. Each eucalypt, so tightly packed together as they are, wore a heavy coating of water and each step was a bucket of cold water thrown at your body in some kind of Crossfit EMOM (every minute on the minute) except this was every 10 seconds on the 10 seconds.

Our hands turned into curled up useless claws, I was shivering uncontrollably, and Doug was stumbling about tripping over sticks and stumps. There was no trail and all I could think about was getting to the valley bottom so we could put up the tent, crawl inside and try to rewarm ourselves. And then I remembered our toilet paper thin sleeping bags....

At some point, far too late in the day, we said to each other "This is shit, let's turn around." We had a few kilometres of bush-wacking, twice that of fire trail walking and about 800 metres of gain to get back to the car. We walked back without stopping, I could not stop, I was simply too cold and my hands were barely functioning. When I got back to the car, I fumbled to undo zippers, belts, buckles and buttons. I could see my hands but they did not seem to follow instructions from my brain. When I managed to strip all my clothes off, I finally realised why I had been so cold - every piece of clothing right down to my underwear was wringing wet. I looked with astonishment at my skin which was mottled in the way that cadavers are mottled.

I put on all the dry clothes I had left in the car, two puff jackets and shivered while Doug brewed up some hot water for tea. Driving down the road, with the heater blowing high, after about a half hour, I finally warmed up enough to take one puff jacket off. Doug, whose gear is in better shape than mine, had stayed dry on his torso and was thus not nearly as chilled as I.

Winding down the hill to our home town as evening moved in, we began planning our return trip, because outdoor adventurers have remarkably short memories and it does not seem to matter how many times we get shellacked, we still go back again.