Day 2 Victorian High Country
The morning wasn't too cold, but Ian decided to get up around 5:00 am and start chopping wood to try and reignite the nights before embers. No respect to his fellow campers!. I believe the smell of bacon and eggs finally enticed me out of my swag.
An inspection of the river showed that the inundation had eased, with the water level dropping an inch or so.
We then decided to break camp quickly and continued on up King Billy Track. Not long after we captured our first real High country views as we broke through the cloud layer. And what a view!, alpine peaks, deep valleys and a blue cloudless sky. Something we didn't expect after the previous days deluge.
Further climbing up the steep track we came across the remnants of an ancient glacier, very spectacular contrast against the treed background.
We made Howitt Rd junction in good time, selected 2wd fanged it up to 80k's, past a heap of cars that probably were owned by hikers on the Bicentenary trail, and then before we knew it we turned onto the Zeka spur track for more spectacular views, and some serious low range terrain for the Nav's.
We stopped half way down Zeka when eying off some good firewood. out came the penis extensions, oops I mean chainsaws. Soon wood chips and 2 stroke was filing the air, Aido and Ian were like pigs in shit until 3 or 4 separate groups of campers came up the spur, causing a need to reposition cars and frantic splitting and loading of wood.
We cautiously continued down the spur and finally entered the Wonnangatta Valley, The river was high and moving fast, after some procrastinating we plunged on through and made a beeline for a camp site.
The afternoon was spent drying out tents and swags from the day before, chopping wood, visitng the ruins of the homestead and cemetery and sinking piss. We decided to light the fire early to get some good coals to cook up a roast in the camp oven, problem was the wood we collected up on the spur failed to ignite, it just smoldered and smoked, fairly pitiful and dissapointing considering we had a tonne of the stuff. Aido and Ian decided to break out the saws again and went off to find better combustibles. I attempted to show off by pouring a few litres of diesel on, but even that failed miserably. The fellas returned with half a tree that with a lot more diesel finally got going, after a couple of hours we finally had a fire to be proud off.
With dinner on, we finished off the days sunlight with plenty of cans and even more tall stories.
We ate well that night, roast lamb, corn, spuds onion and carrots. The fire that had caused us troubles was now raging, and an inspection down the valley showed other camper with nothing more than gas lanterns and smoldering ashes. All night we saw others head out looking to find decent firewood, you could see the jealousy as they saw our fire while driving past.
No one else matched our fire that night!
Aido crashed early, complaining about a headache, maybe a consequence of buying a D22?
Ian and I finished off the night with a few more drinks, and a star filled high country sky.
Have to make this an annual event!
Jason.
