Today Morven & I decided to go for a walk in Sturt Gorge. We checked out the council website and found a Walking Trails brochure of the area, and decided on a trail that is only 6km long but rated as “hard” and sounded really interesting (Sturt Gorge walk, “Walk A”). We decided not to print the map, because we had the GPS. It was an awesome walk.

At times, the trail seemed a little washed away and was a little hard to follow. It seemed to come to a dead end at one point, so we back-tracked to a 4WD crossing over the river, and hopped across the rocks. It took us up a massive hill on the other side of the gorge to what we started. At this point, the GPS informed us we were heading in the right direction of the car, and it was only 800m away. Since we’d already been walking for an hour and a half, we decided just to follow the road back to the car. AFter walking for a few minutes, we were only 400m away from the car – but it was pointing to the other side of the Gorge! We kept walking, hoping there would be a road which hooks back around the gorge. At the point where we were now 1.2km away from the car, and heading in completely the opposite direction, I called my brother to look up Google Maps for us. After a few minutes of discussion, we realised we had to just go back into the Gorge and do what the GPS told us. This is where the real adventure started, because we had to connect all these really vague, indecisive trails together to work our way down into the Gorge, and cross the river several times just so we could walk along until we found a section where there wasn’t a 20m cliff face in our way. It was amazing to see what we had walked down when we got back up to the top on the other side.

Eventually we got back to the car, and went straight to a deli in Flagstaff Hill and “gorged” our faces with food and drink. What an adventure! Check out the rough sketch of where we went on Google Maps.

Highlights of the walk (apart from doing it with my lovely girlfriend) were getting right up close to some really old Xanthorreas plants (commonly called “black boys”), hopping over slippery rocks whilst walking beside/along the river, and having to hug a rock wall whilst standing on suspended tree roots only 4cm in diameter just to continue along the walking track without falling into the river, and of course all the beautiful scenery along the way!

I just wanted to write how I had a great hike with Morv on the weekend, and here are some beautiful photos:

The walk was from the old mines, up towards eagle on the hill. Morv had the idea that we should get a group of people to hike from her house one night to this beautiful spot we found for a picnic, and walk back again.

Last night was a night hike that I organised in Morialta Conservation Park. Some may have called it a disaster hike, I myself call it a delve into unknown territory. Click on the icon to bring up a map of where I intended we go (green line) VS where we actually went (red line).

The SMS I invited people with went something like this:

NIGHTHIKE 2NITE: 8pm, end of Cortlyne Rd, Ross Trevor. Easy walk along Fox Hill firetrail (3.5km) to Norton Summit pub

What the SMS should have said was:

NIGHTHIKE 2NITE: 8pm, end of Cortlyne Rd, Ross Trevor. Extremely steep inclines along some random firetrail (5km) to some random place. Be ready to be punished.

The reason for this, was because:

1. I left my torches at home (although I sped back to Paul’s house to borrow one – however it wasn’t too bad without them because although it was only about a 20% moon, the clouds in the sky did well at reflecting the city lights. There wasn’t really any time which required a torch).
2. I left the map at home.
3. I had never actually been anywhere near this firetrail before.

In total, 9 people rocked up including myself. Referring to the map above, it was bad because I thought that even though I left my map at home we would be okay, becuase we could just use the boundary of Morialta Conservation Park as guiderails to the top right corner. This then would lead to Norton Summit Rd, which is of course where the target of the mission was, the Norton Summit Hotel – aka beer and good times!

It went horribly wrong as you’ll see on the map, where the road (red line = bad) went straight up, and because it was dark we didn’t see the turn off to stay within Morialta Conservation Park. We ended up going I believe 1 to 1.5 times the width of the map up the road, hence doubling the distance to the pub. We never actually made it either. Ben Perry did nearly get killed by a speeding ute doing rally driving along Moores Road. He evaded being hit at 100km/h by a mere 20cm – he thought the lights behind him were our torches, which was a near fatal mistake.

Despite a late start (8:45pm instead of 8pm) due to some late comers that never ended up coming, and the extra several kilometres of extra steep inclines I subjected the 8 people to, I did manage to get them back to their cars by 11:57pm, the same day we left!

All in all, everyone seemed to enjoy the night (or at least they were good liars) and I’m already planning the next one – on a full moon, and a National Park that I know like the back of my hand (Cleland). Stay tuned! Please leave a comment below this post for an expression of interest of the next hike.

Today there was lots of smoke over Adelaide, due to fires in Mt Gambier. The photo below was taken from Mt Lofty using a polaroid lens on sunset. Click on the image to go to the complete gallery of sunset photos that I took.