We had a very lazy start to the day with a sleep in and no it wasn’t due to drinking to much last night. Even Tash managed to sleep in a little bit. We had a nice hot cook-up for breaky and decided to take it easy and go for a drive through the rest of the park to see if there wasn’t anyone else around.
After cleaning up from breaky we headed out to the other campground – The Pines – where we found 3 other vans. From The Pines we headed back to Bald Hill Creek Falls (the ones we trekked to the other day) and they might have been trickling a little more than other day from last nights rain.
From the falls we headed out to Bracken Hut – an old restored 1930’s cattlemen’s hut that is now used by back country walkers. The only facilities other than walls and roof are the fire and outdoor dunny (toilet). the cottage/Hut must be booked through the National Parks website if you wish to stay overnight.
We opted not to do the 50km odd return drive to the Breeza Lookout as the weather was coming back over and we were really looking to have a lazy day and there were a few ‘walks’ along the road that we wanted to do – so that will go on the “next time” list.
From there we headed back to camp via the old Coxs creek sawmill. The sawmill formerly known as Bone Creek was established around 1950, the sawmill burnt down in 1959 and there a few remaining structures from the timber milling period – the old boiler and mill footings.
We had settled in for a lazy afternoon but it felt just too lazy, so we decided to head up to the lookout and see what was happening with the approaching storm (oh and check that the world survived into New Year’s Day ’cause there’s mobile service at the lookout!). As i wandered out to the lookout the ‘roos were keeping on a close eye on me.
The approaching storm looked like it was going to be a cracker so i knew i couldn’t hang around too long as i wanted to get a few more ‘scenery’ shots on the way back to camp.
Damp Roads make it all that much more fun!
The vegetation is quite varied across the whole park but it is that thick green canopy that keeps you cool in the summer heat.
Off to the side of our campground there is a short walk through to the grass trees that we were yet to explore. The weather from that storm was really starting to look a little ominous so we decided that it was now or possibly “next trip”, so we headed off down the little track to find the grass trees.
The track is about 600m and really isn’t too much different to the other tracks and vegetation we had seen throughout the park, and then all of sudden these grasstrees start appearing and seriously i am sure that the book character “Grug” was designed around them. It seems totally random that they are there and all clumped in together. we followed the loop track around these Giant Grasstrees, which are said to be several hundreds of years old and some of Australia’s oldest.
Just as we got back to camp the rain came down and whilst we said it rained last night it really was just spitting – enough to annoy us and get the canvas wet but the ground in places because of the canopy coverage was still almost dry. Today’s rain however was proper soaking decent rain, which we knew the area was looking for so we couldn’t complain too much.
We did however have to do some quick thinking as we hadn’t put the full wrap around awning on and we needed to get to the kitchen at the back of the van without us and everything getting drenched. we managed to improvise with a quick setup awning we had in the truck -it wasn’t pretty or that practicable but it did let us get to the kitchen without getting soaked. Apparently the tops gets approximately 1000mm of rain with most falling between December to February, a little unknown fact for us to keep in mind for our next trip LOL.
Luckily we had leftovers and we had decided that we would just reheat on the Snowpeak, and given that we had the campground to ourselves we relocated to the shelter and made our kitchen, campfire and lounge room there for the night.
By the time we had eaten and were ready to tidy up the rain had stopped and we were hopeful we wouldn’t get too much more so that we could pack up the canvas dry in the morning, because our time in the Tops had unfortunately come to an end.
Next post: Canada ’17 – Sydney to Vancouver.
Sounds like a nice little adventure, even with the rain not being on your side! I also love the feeling the overcast weather gave your photos. Looks great!