I put this up as a club trip for the UTS Outdoors Adventure club as a day walk since I was going to do it anyway. If I was spending the fuel and time to get up there, might aswell drag a few people along for some company too. Marty did warn me with an email about the walk being quite hard and the lack of water, but I assured him I had emergency protocols in place such as a steripen & satellite phone.
Darran and Dani pulled out, worried about the potential rain, so in the end the party consisted of our presidente Karena Shell, Danny Tan, Nick Tang and his friend Micheal, Kevin Lai and Medical Student Jason Wu. I picked up Nick and Crew at 7.25 after he 25 mins late, so it was only an hours drive from Strathfield up to the Queen Victoria Hospital. By the time I was back there with Danny after the car shuffle ready for the walk, it was 9:30am.
It turned out to be an awesome day for walking weather wise, but recent rains had left a more sinister problem: leeches. there were sooo many it was unbelieveable. At one stage, every single one of us had leeches crawling up our shoes and into our socks. Karena was the first victiim, wearing only shorts, she had a leech crawl up into her socks and gave her a good suck.
Next came Jason's stunt jump off a 1 metre log just before we reached the Kedumba river crossing. He landed awkwardly and twisted his L knee. He suspected a lateral meniscus but i was in shock at that time as I saw a washed up dead wombat by the crossing which I had thought to be a boar. I was busy checking the river out as it meant that we werent able to continue our journey if the river level was too high. luckily we were able to cross the river on the log but Jason's knee turned out to be a bit more than a slight sprain of some ligament.
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| Crossing the Kedumba River in flood |
He soldiered on and up Solitary we went. Micheal found it real hard going once we reached the start of the Solitary climb and had to take breaks every 2 minutes. Kevin, Kaz and Danny reached the Col at 1pm while the rest of us finally made it there after 4 hours of walking at 1.25.
After our lunch with several leeches on us, we made the move at 2:30pm along Solitary. Micheal had lost his nalgene so i provided him with half a litre of my gatoraded water. got to chinamans at 4:30 and stocked up on water. The climb down was incredibly slow due to the group's inexperience and Jasons' knee was starting to give grief. He finally let in and took tablets at the bottom of the climb.
I had expected the finish to be reached by 7:30 but it was actually a good 3.6km walk from the start of the ruined castle to the golden stairs, which we reached by 7:50pm. the climp up said it should take 40 minutes but i think i took it easy and took about 30 minutes arriving just as it got dark at 8:20pm
kaz wanted to visit some url festival with Danny but kev was hungry, didnt have cash and wanted to go home to moms cooking. I was pretty tired too to be honest but wanted a beer. we ended up deciding to drop the boys off at Strathfield which was a 2 hour drive from Katoomba and I was home by 10:30 ready for a long awaited Dinner cooked by my lovely wife Mai.
