Rachel Grindlay

This was my second trip to Winburndale – given how many closures and areas with unpleasant regrowth there are at the moment I’m surprised I hadn’t thought to come back here sooner. Sure the walking is a little contrived as the areas is riddled with fire trails but if you pretend they aren’t there then there is some really nice walking to be had.

Getting to camp mid-afternoon I thought we had plenty of time. Most of us headed off on a water run. I blithely said I wasn’t taking a torch as we wouldn’t need them. But we got into the creek where we’d found water on my previous trip, and it was pretty algae-ridden. We kept pushing downstream until we eventually found some small pools without any algae. By the time the seven of us had filled up water there was only 20 minutes till sunset.

I complained that missing sunset when we had a high camp defeated the point, but Paul assured me we’d be back in time. Silently I thought there was no chance. As we crested the first ridge on our way back we could see the sun setting through the trees. Oh well. Then we crossed the saddle and popped up on the ridge we were camping on to see the sun just about to go below the horizon. Amazing. And what a spectacular sunset it was – one of the best in many months.

Sunrise was pretty speccy the next morning – lots of valley cloud adding a magical touch as the sun slowly hit the ridges spread out across the valley.

One of the party had sprained their ankle the previous day so we split the group on Sunday. Tom headed out with two of the others via the fire trails that the rest of us were pretending didn’t exist. The remaining 5 of us reversed my 2020 day one route. This was really enjoyable walking along the conglomerate escarpment. I think the angle of the views and walking away from the sun made this direction the better one. We spotted 3 goats, quite a few wallabys and heard plenty of lyrebirds in the valley below.

A really enjoyable weekend of walking with a great group.