Both Flanks of the Valley

Six kilometres across the valley floor, and most of it taken at a crawl. The kangaroos were everywhere that morning, standing in the road and beside it and behind whatever bush they had chosen to appear from, and there is a record at stake in that situation. Nearly three years on the road and we have never hit an animal. Not one. It is not luck, or not entirely: it is driving slowly, and it is not driving at dawn or dusk or after dark if there is any way to avoid it. Whole days get shaped around that rule. So the six kilometres took a while.

There were a fair few cars at the tracking station when we got there, which told us the walks branching out from it were being used. We kitted up, boots and packs and poles, and set off on the ten kilometre round trip to the Granite Tors. Grammy stayed with her van. She had the tracking station to herself for most of the day, and she went through it properly, reading every information board on the site. The station itself is the same story as Honeysuckle: concrete foundations, footings, the shape of something that used to be there. The two sites sit only a couple of kilometres apart as a bird would measure it, Honeysuckle north of here and over the ridge, a long way round by road. Two dishes in the same range, both pointed at the same sky, both reduced now to slabs in the grass.

Five kilometres up. That is the honest description of the outward leg, a steady climb that does not let up much, and the poles earned their place. At the top the old observatory is still standing, which after two sets of foundations felt like a small act of defiance. We went through it, sat down, ate something, and then took the loop track out among the tors.

Huge granite boulders, stacked and balanced and split, standing in among the ghost gums. From up there we could look straight across the valley to Legoland on the far side, where we had stood a fortnight earlier after riding five kilometres uphill out of Honeysuckle. Two formations facing each other across the same ground, one on each flank, and we had now been on both. Along with the ridge above and the valley floor below, the place was starting to feel properly known rather than merely visited.

We went after a couple of caches while we were up there and did not find either of them. That happens more often than the successes get credit for. What it does, though, is send you clambering into gaps between boulders you would have walked straight past, and looking at the underside of overhangs you had no reason to look at, and the not finding is a small price for the looking. It did that here.

The descent was the descent. Five kilometres of giving it all back, and much easier than the climb, and we were at the bottom with an hour or so of daylight still going.

The car park had emptied while we were up there. The day walkers had gone home and the kangaroos had come back out, spread through the grass in every direction. Sal went into the bus, the cold having arrived with the low sun. Anth put a jumper on and went back out on foot through the tracking station, working the caches around the site, and came back with enough of them to square the ledger against the two he had missed at the top.

The last car left. That settled it. Rather than driving anywhere in the dark, with the kangaroos out and the record to think about, we stayed where we were and made a camp of the car park. It was quiet up there, quieter than the campground had been, and the valley held it all night. In the morning the bus would go back into the city and Sal would do two days at Trinity.Read more