Day 5 – Mackays Hut to Happys Hut

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Happiness is mandatory

Woke to a hut shrouded in fog. Today will be our last serious bit of off track walking. Scott is nursing a strained leg muscle and has elected to do a road walk instead and meet us at Happys Hut.

The rest of us made our way across button grass to Boobee Hut. The walking wasn’t as hard as in the Jagungal wilderness, but still fairly taxing.

Boobee hut is fantastic, with a bunk bed, wood stove/oven, plenty of light, a comfortable chair, and wall decorations. The bird life is also vivacious, with fantail cuckoos and possibly some wattle birds. The hut has been rebuilt in recent years after having burned in a bushfire.

I’m not ashamed to say, I’m a Boobee fan.

I found Rod’s entry in the log book from last year right before we met up at Broken Dam. He’ll have to hike out there again to see what I scrawled next to his note.

From Boobee hut a gently winding and undulating access track took us to Happy Jack’s Road.

Faced with a choice between 3.5km off-track or 7km of road, we chose the road. Happy Jack’s Road is a broad, gentle gravel road closed to public vehicles. It crosses creeks with huge culverts and spans gullies atop large earth works. Our best guess is that it was built for the Snowy Hydro scheme. We flew along it at breakneck pace.

Another gently worn access track (for parks vehicles servicing the huts) leads to Brooks Hut, also recently rebuilt. We passed a large number of yellow hawk moth orchids along the way.

And then a jaunty 2.5km off track to Happy’’’s Hut.

We reached Happys Hut about twenty minutes before the first drops fell. We all scrambled to get our shelters up then set about doing camp chores and mistakenly eating dinner at 4pm because it felt like 7pm. A light hail fell. Updated forecasts seem to say that the heavy thunderstorms of the next two days have largely fizzled out, as so often seems to be the case. Weather modeling relies on historical data, and climate change means there’s little good data for whatever bullshit the climate is doing right now.

We got a cozy fire going in the fireplace and spent a pleasant evening cracking jokes, reflecting on the walk so far, and sharing stories. Even Inga, who likes huts but doesn’t like to be inside them, was lured in.