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!
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