FJCC Monkey Gum

BUSH CAMPING

I had to start this short trip off with a night in the bush. Its not that I dont like camping at Coolendel, but I do prefer a bit of bush privacy. I head off after work looking for a special spot in the bush around Tianjara Falls area.

It wasnt too hard to find, but unfortunately the weather was closing in yet again. I did get to setup camp before the rain started, but there was no oportunity for a fire, so it was an nice early night :)

Unfortunately, the night was a little interrupted during the night when the water pooled up on my awning and then started dripping/running over my swag!

HIT THE TRAIL

After a nice early morning, I packed up and headed off to Coolendel to meet up with whoever else was coming down for the weekend.

I met up with Rod and Gavin just outside Coolendel and we decided to head in and setup camp before hitting the trail.

We were following the detailed notes provided by Boris which took us down the main trail to the bottom of the Power Lines trail. This track was a lot of fun, some tough, some easy sections. And then we arrived at the break in the trail - it was a cliff which had obviously been a track at one time, and then was destroyed probably by running water.

This issue only slowed us down for a minute, as we decided to run up the main trail and see if we could find some side tracks that took us back on to the Power Line trail. We kind of succeeded, and had lots of fun trying anyway!

Later in the day we stopped off at a fantastic lookout over the valley. And it was here that Boris finally caught up with us. Apparently he had been trying to catch up with us for a couple of hours by following our track on my blog, but he was always just a little behind us! Anyway, we collected up some fire wood here and headed back to camp for a leisurely evening.

MONKEY GUM TIME

So today was the big day and we were all ready to hit the trail. We had been lucky with the weather as it had now cleared up and was looking like a great day. We met up with James at the turn off from the main trail and then headed off looking for adventure.

We passed a few other cars coming out of the track, they had been camped down the road for the night. After we checked out their camp area (wombat flat I think it was called) we set off for the main trail.

The track was a little more rutted than I remember, and a couple of rather difficult sections required some spotting from the guys ahead. But we had very few issues to be honest. I had to question Boris' spotting at one stage though (although I am sure I should have trusted him!) but I kept seeing more and more sky out of the windscreen and it unsettled me a little!

We had a lot of fun down the trail, a little mud on the cars, a few more dings and scrapes. My side steps are a little higher again, which is fine, they were too low before :)

All in all a great weekend away, and we have Boris to thank for organising things for us.