23.01km +975m -734m
My pants no longer stay up by themselves. I’ve had to fashion a belt from a piece of cord.
21km to Cowombat Flat today and the VIC/NSW border. Rain last night and more rain forecast today. I’ve heard from southbound walkers that the cowombats are numerous and in their mating season at the moment and care must be taken.
Right after leaving camp, the creek needs to be forded. In the continuing saga of me trying to both keep my feet dry and avoid taking my boots off, I attempted to walk across a fallen tree a few metres upstream. Lest anyone accuse me of cherry picking things to put in this blog, here’s an unnecessarily long video of me completely losing my nerve halfway across:
We saw a moose deer running across the hill on the opposite side of the gully. A massive buck. I was too slow with the camera, but it looked a lot like this:
As so often is the case, the sighting of the moose deer portended rain.
Rain gear on. Here I am modelling this years offering from the house de Chris; a stunning little two-piece consisting of a pack cover with built-in cape, and matching hat cover.
Pretty boring road walking, so here’s a video of Rod walking across a creek.
And twenty-three rainy, uninteresting kilometres later, we emerged into Cowombat Flat:
We waited for a break in the rain then set up camp. Ten minutes later, the sun came out.
The Murray River has its headwaters just a few kilometres from here. Strange to think that the small trickle that begins here grows and swells to the continent’s greatest river, before being sucked dry by agriculture and reverting to a small trickle as it piddles into the ocean south of Adelaide.
It’s also the location of the 1954 wreck of an RAAF C-47 Dakota. One died, and the survivors, one seriously injured, walked about 60km back the direction we’ve come from to Benambra. The Air Force recovered much of the wreckage, and souvenir hunters have taken more. There’s a scar high on a nearby tree, and my sleuthing skills suggest they may have clipped it with a wing, ripping it off before crashing shortly after. I think the Air Force took the mostly intact fuselage and other wing, leaving the mangled one on the Flat. The remaining wreckage looks a bit like a crumpled wing.
ASMR: view from the hammock as rain patters on the tarp and a muffin bakes slowly in the foreground.
