16.52km +336m -803m
A clear, mild night with the stars all shining bright, and the moon didn’t rise until late, and a chorus of birdsong to bring in the morning.
Some friendly campers loaned me a phone charging cable last night, averting disaster.
Mount Tennent, the last peak on the walk (we go over the saddle) beyond which lies the visitors centre and their freezer of assorted ice creams. The regrowth through here is very thick, following the 19/20 fires and subsequent years of heavy rainfall.
Out onto Bushfold Flats:
Black Mountain tower in the distance, and in the foreground the suburbs of North Cooma! It’s all downhill from here!
The Tharwa Cornetto Emporium!
One final dip of the hat in cool water. The temperature was around 30° by this point.
About a kilometre from the finish line we were met by John Evans from the Canberra Bushwalking Club, who I’ve walked with a number of times and who’s been following this blog. It was a touching welcome, though I was perhaps a little too exhausted to express it well.
And before we knew it, we were crossing Nass road and into the grounds of the visitors centre.
And then we were finished. Much like the way it started, it ended with a few steps that weren’t particularly different to the hundreds of thousands in-between.
John very kindly shouted us Cornettos and drinks, and the rangers had us sign the guest book, printed our certificates and gave us trail markers.
We relaxed on the (tiled, not rough-hewn timber) verandah with a view of Mount Tennent, feeling sort of dazed and bewildered that it was over. We had another ice cream. Maybe cicadas chirped in the heat, or maybe I imagined it. Occasional cars roared past out of sight on the nearby road. The civilised world opened its maw to swallow us again.
