PC Trail via The Elbow & Blackrock Pool

We woke up bright and early at 4am for the first day of our walk and quickly packed up and got ready. We walked over to the dining room where we had a coffee and collected our breakfast of fruit. We jumped in the car and drove the 20minutes to the start of the trail. We could see the first signs of light as we pulled into the carpark and started walking at 5:25am.

The whole hike was along the Piccaninny Creek and there were only signs for the first 4.5km and then afterwards you just had to follow the creek bed. It was beautiful seeing the moon above the bungle bungles as we started hiking. We walked along the bed of the creek and at first it was quite hard but then we walked through pebbles and sand which was slower going. As the sun started to rise it warmed up and the walking became harder in the sun with our packs on.

We stopped along the way and had some of our fruit which had mangoes, blueberries, strawberries and apples, which was absolutely delicious. We continued on to the elbow and arrived 3 hours later having completed 10km. We stopped and ate the rest of our breakfast and enjoyed the views.

After our stop we started to walk into the gorge and not long later we found the turn off to Black Rock Pool. It was quite a rocky walk towards the pool and we dropped off our packs and just took the water bottles in and the purifier. We were advised to fill up all our bottles and the 10L water pack at Black Rock Pool as it was the cleanest water. It took nearly an hour to purify all the water using the Gryll Water Purifier. Once all the bottles were full we rearranged our packs as I was carrying the 10L bottle. The next 5km were absolutely exhausting clambering over rocks and walking along the sand with our extremely heavy packs and not much shade.

We finally arrived at what was called ‘Basecamp’ and we relaxed on the sand and had our lunch and even boiled water for a coffee.Read more