Around the Orroral Valley

Without any clear goal in mind, I’d left the van at the Orroral Campground and walked northwest along the wide and grassy river valley on a good trail. After a couple of kilometres, a solid metal bridge crosses the Orroral River and a grassy trail continues northwest to the old Orroral Homestead. Instead of crossing the bridge, I wandered up the grassy valley until I was under the large granite tors at point 1201 on the topographic map, known as Orroral Tors.

Having looked up at the these tors many times before on trips out of the Orroral Valley I foolishly began to walk up. The initial 50 to 70 metres of elevation gain was reasonable with easy enough bush to get through. Gradually, then suddenly (mostly suddenly, in fact) the bush got outrageously thick with an extremely prickly and thickly growing shrub (could be gorse bitter pea). I was not dressed for bush-bashing in shorts and a tee-shirt and was soon sporting full body scratches as well as having several plant spines embedded in my flesh. It was about this point that I also realised I had forgotten to text Doug before I left Canberra and, if he didn’t hear from me for three days, he would be worried.

I keyed up an I’m OK text to send but had no service. Much to my chagrin, I realised I would have to drive back out of the Orroral Valley to find service. This made my decision to turn around easy, although I can’t say it was hard. Strangely enough as I walked back down the valley, my phone pinged that I had got a text from Doug. A bit of walking about randomly turning the phone around while holding it in the air and I even managed to get Doug on the phone.

Back at the bridge, I crossed over to the west side and walked north towards the old Orroral Homestead. A half kilometre before the old homestead there is a side trip up a little hill which has a nice view over the valley. After wandering around the old homestead site I walked back to the van for the night.

Next day I drove up the valley to the old space station site and walked up the Granite Tors track. This is a very good and popular track that follows the route of an old road but is gently switch-backed with steps. At the top, there is a short loop and you can enter the bottom floor of the old space observatory and admire the view from a lookout. Back down in the valley, I had lunch and tea before riding my mountain bike northwest up the Orroral Valley. The Orroral Valley is home to thousands of kangaroos which hopped away in waves as I rode past.

On my final day, I drove up to Honeysuckle Campground and continued part way up the dirt road to ridge top. I’ve walked up and down this road before and it’s hard pack, dusty and unpleasant to walk. But, it’s also steep so I only drove part way and ended up walking the steepest section. At ridge top, there is a tourist hike around Legoland (lots of boulders and caves made of stacked boulders) which you can extend along climbers tracks as there are rock climbs up here. Back at the campground, I detoured up to the old space station for lunch where I had a walk around and pondered man landing on the moon all those years ago.

Among the interpretive signage at the site is this “Message from Australia,” written by Australia’s 19^th (short-lived) Prime Minister on the occasion of the lunar landing. It’s hard not to read this message and wonder at the abject deterioration in Australian ambition. How did we go from avowing as a nation to value exploring, going further, having courage and, most importantly believing that the “chance of dangerous adventure [should be] available to all” to nation of rule makers and followers, gleefully shutting down any chance to experience even a modicum of risk?