A Northern Wollemi foray (6-7 Jun 2026)

We were a week out from the June long weekend and had no plans. I can’t remember how I got distracted from the other options we were considering, and started reading about the Yodellers Range.

One of challenges with most of the Northern Wollemi is access – it’s largely surrounded by private property – so working out who to get permission from, and then getting the permission, is a crucial part of of the trip planning process. Given we didn’t do that until two days out from the weekend, I didn’t commit myself much into the details, as I figured it might just all fall over. Possibly that was a good thing as I may have got cold feet if I’d paid more attention…

I had looked up the 2019/20 fires map. Or at least I thought I had. And it told me that the area we were heading to hadn’t burnt. I was so confident in this that I didn’t bother with gaiters. So I was a bit surprised to find evidence of fire, but more on that later. (Spoiler it turned out it definitely did burn in 2019.)

Anyway, back to getting there. Part of the attraction was that Google told me it was ‘only’ a 3.5 hour drive from Sydney (not counting the drive through private property). That’s comparable with some of the other places we regularly walk. Since we hadn’t been there before we were happy not to pack the full three days with walking. As it turned out by the time we stopped for petrol, then had surprisingly good coffee in Denman, and did a couple of laps around a paddock trying to follow the incorrectly marked road route on Google, that it was a lot later than we’d intended when we were ready to start walking.

Immediately our plans went out the window, and we changed up the itinerary. In retrospect this ended up being an excellent decision, as we were only then lugging two days of water for a few hours.

Leaving our car at at the entry to the National Park we climbed the locked gate and set off on the Myrtle Trail. We didn’t like the look of the spot we’d intended to go off track, so once again the plan changed and we continued on. There’d been a fair bit of rain in previous two weeks, so there were a few pools in Myrtle Creek, and a lot of damp rock once we left the trail. We managed to get ourselves up a fair way, but we weren’t counting our chickens too early. We were still burnt from our 2020 Bylong trip, it only takes one 2m cliff you can’t get up before all progress to that point becomes irrelevant.

Fortunately on this trip we were able to find ledges or slots where we needed to, and were happy to find ourselves near the top of the range, for a not too late lunch.

Tom assured me we were about 50m from our intended camp. I think it was a bit more than that, but not long after lunch we found ourselves at a great campsite. Very happy to relieve ourselves of the heavy packs and reload with just day packs, we set off to see if we could find a way into the saddle to our north. This proved somewhat challenging, especially when we didn’t go in the direction we really needed to. Instead we found ourselves viewing a very enticing narrow ridge. We tried to get out onto it, but a few too many crevices later, we decided we should refocus back to the original goal.

One small drop stymied Tom, who wasn’t going to go down it while I was off looking at other routes. By this point we’d used a fair bit of our allocated exploring time, but I convinced him we should just put the tape down and hope that we could get back up again. And so, a few minutes later we made it to the sun-lit pillar we’d been seeing for much of the afternoon. No time for afternoon tea since we didn’t know whether we’d find a more direct route back to camp, and there’s not much daylight in mid June.

Fortunately we managed to both get back up the small drop, and find a pretty direct route back to camp, so plenty of time to enjoy the views!

There was no wind, and no noise. The silence, as they say, was deafening. With a waning moon and no cloud we also had amazing stars. Of course that also meant a saturated tent!

The next day our plan was to walk to the southern end of the range. This involved several knolls to work our way through. Our route finding was pretty good – thanks to our skill… I mean LiDAR maps.

At one point we were stopped by a tricky cliff. Tom checked out the obvious possible route, but was unconvinced, so I assumed that meant we’d have to detour down and around.

Tom encouraged me to go have a look at the route. Up close I realised it was a fair bit easier than it appeared from afar – just with severe consequences. We decided to go for it – Tom went up without a pack and put a tape in place. The tape’s value was primarily psychological, as the angles didn’t really lend themselves to using it. But, with the full packs, having just that little bit of extra balance is always helpful. We made it up, across the knoll, then down the other side without any further impediments.

We had a relatively early lunch on the final knoll before the range turns to rolling hills. How far to the trail I asked? About 2km. That doesn’t sound too bad. How far have we come this morning? Oh, probably less than 1.5km as the crow flies. Hmm.

We’d seen plenty of evidence of the fires – though fortunately most of our route was sufficiently rocky that the scrub had never been overly thick. As I looked across to the knoll we would be climbing to, I declared the canopy looked intact and therefore the going wouldn’t be too bad. The saddle itself was fine – though it looked like sometime in the recent past it would have been horrendous. It was now full of smooth young trees, with many dead vines. The vines had died and broken, and it was relatively straight forward to make our way through them.

Unfortunately the canopy was not intact for long sections of our exit route. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered me too much, however we came across a few stands of prickly acacia (Acacia paradoxa). These were a nightmare as the entire plant (stem and branches) is covered in thorns. The dead plants grab onto you, and we were forced into a couple of stops to take our shirts off, to pull out numerous thorns embedded in our clothing.

As we made our way up to the knoll we encountered more and more prickly pear. I don’t think I’ve seen so much in one place in Australia. The range is a basalt cap so I assume the growing conditions are more favourable than elsewhere.

Leaving the knoll we still had 1km to go to the firetrail. The first few hundred metres was delightful open walking. But then we got stuck in some of the most dense regrowth we’d had on the trip (and in recent months). Reviewing the GPS log afterwards we probably could have taken a more direct line, and cut down our efforts, but eventually we were spat out onto the trail. Time for another shirt-off and thorn removal session!

Now we just had a long walk back to the car.

If we’d done a bit more investigation and realised there was a water tank at Sandy Camp Hut we would have likely brought more food with us. We’d not expected to be able to pick up water anywhere, so figured we would have to get back to the car on night 2. It was a bit of shame as we would’ve been happy to camp at the hut, but without dinner, it wouldn’t have been too enjoyable.

Instead we had cheese & biscuits at 4pm at Keiths Lookout, then marched on into the dark. We got back to our car just on complete darkness.

Setting up camp on the National Park side of the fence, we just had to retrieve water and food for a very pleasant night. The contrast from the previous night’s silence was clear – a yellow-bellied glider frequently pierced the night with its range of shrieks, rattles and gurgling calls.

The next morning we headed back to civilisation (very slowly), well pleased with our first foray on the (easy end?) of the Yodellers Range.