Daily distance: 24.3km
Total distance:1079km
What a night..... dry hut, fire going, comfortable mattress, soft pillow and a Southern Boobook calling all night! All good things come to an end at some stage and we had to get out of our sleeping bags. A change there, was to wake up and make coffee first thing before packing up in the tent. Awesome......
Anyway we packed up, cleaned the ash out the fireplace, started sweeping out the hut and it started raining! I wont tell you my language but just add bit of Irish to it and you'll know what I was saying..... Another cup of tea which we drank slowly, however the weather was set in. No way around it, we put on the wet weather gear and headed out.
The trail took us north in Wonoka Creek for a kilometer, before turning east into the Mernmerna Creek. This is a wide dry creek with a nice even flat bottom which was not difficult to walk on. The scenery, which we only saw in glimpses through the misty rain was spectacular. The creek was in a deep valley with towering peaks on either side. At some stages the walls of the creek were sheer with amazing red rock jutting into the sky. I kinda wondered what we would do if a flash flood came down, but then would dismiss the thought as quickly as possible!
We would've missed the next offramp if I had not cheacked the GPS. The Slaty Creek tributary we needed to take was really very small and inconspicuous, and the Heysen signage was very poor when we did find it, it was well hidden. No worries, into Slaty Creek we proceeded and up a steep incline before turning east once again to get round a mountain. The vegetation turned to indigenous pine, which at one stage became very dense. It was at this stage that I started noticing fresh tracks of walkers, maybe four, who had climbed on the trail sometime this morning.
These tracks and I became good mates over the course of the day, as they helped me with our route finding in a big way. It was just a lot easier tracking the walkers at stages than it was trying to find the Heysen route markers. It was also very obvious that they were going the same way we were, so whenever I lost the trail I would just go into tracking mode. We never did catch up to them, but I have a sneaky feeling we will find those same tracks when we get to the Wilpena Pound Resort tomorrow!
Even though it rained the whole day, on and off, it was not a heavy downpour but rather a soft misty type rain. This however did become a tad frustrating as we would get hot with the ponchos on, so would take them off when the rain stopped, only to have it start again five minutes later. Eventually we just left them on and just perspired. We spent seven kilometers in the Slaty Creek with the Elder Ranges towering over us on the west, and the Red Ranges towering over us to the east. When the clouds and mist did part, it was spectacular!
We reached the Red Ranges Campsite, had a bite to eat and filled our bladders (water containers) as we had decided to push on as far as possible today to lesson the distance we have to walk tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will be clear so we can see the cliffs and gorges we will be walking through. We continued this afternoon until it started getting dark before we chose a camping spot for the night. As we took our packs off the sky, opened up and we saw blue sky.... I now have a three quarter moon and stars above my head magnificently illuminating the towering cliffs of the Elder Range above us. Man this is amazing country...... not only that. We are alone, as in... nobody knows where we are, where we have come from, where we are going.... An awesome feeling!
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