Hey all, me again...
Had a little time off uni, and my partner had some time off work, so why not go walking? We had yet to climb any of the Abels in the NE of the state, so that seemed a good place to start.
The original plan was to climb 10 Abels in 5 days, but a combination of factors (mostly being tired ) led to us coming home a day early. The original list was:
Arthur
Barrow
Maurice
Ben Nevis
Saddleback
Albert
Victoria
East Tower
West Tower
Legges Tor
And the list at the end of the trip was thus:
Arthur
Barrow
Ben Nevis
Saddleback
Albert
Victoria
East Tower
West Tower
As usual, plenty of photos, so I'll just do a couple each post I guess!
Arthur was first up, and was relatively easy to find, even if the parking wasn't necessarily. No lovely grassy clearing existed, as the Abels Vol 1 suggested, but rather there was a space on the side of the road opposite the "no parking past this point" sign where one was able to stop. After we eventually worked this out (it really shouldn't have been that hard... I blame the early start!), it was a couple of hundred metres down the road to the start of the track.
It was a fairly steady climb up through some beautiful rainforest from there, following a well taped/cairned track:
172 by bigggbird, on Flickr
After 45 mins to an hour, we reached the summit plateau, which was strewn with equipment, including various towers and fire lookout spots:
093 by bigggbird, on Flickr
144 by bigggbird, on Flickr
Beautiful views up there, from Launceston behind you all the way across to the east coast! As much as it would be nice to not have all of the equipment up there, it really doesn't detract much from the surroundings.
What made this walk even nicer was the fact that we had some unexpected company!:
061 by bigggbird, on Flickr
This very happy, friendly little pup followed us all the way from about 10 minutes in to the summit, and back! We ran into another couple of walkers at the summit who had been up before, and they thought he belonged to one of the houses by the bottom of the track. Wouldn't surprise me, he certainly seemed to know his way around! And he was loyal too, they tried to take him from us on their way up to the summit, but he wasn't having a bar of it I like to think it was just because he liked us, but reality is it probably had something to do with the food
A few more shots:
054 by bigggbird, on Flickr
088 by bigggbird, on Flickr
143 by bigggbird, on Flickr
We were sad to have to say goodbye at the end of the walk! Just means we'll have to go back and visit again though
Next up on the list was Mt Barrow, which was supposed to be easy to find... As long as you didn't expect it to be at the end of the Mt Barrow Discovery Trail! Which we obviously followed, and which got us absolutely nowhere, except stuck in a car on top of a big rock after trying to turn around to find the place. Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers!
After exiting the MBDT, we discovered a very well signposted road about 1k further down the road... If only we hadn't seen the other, we might have had time to go up it that day too! As it was though, we ended up camping a few kms up Mt Barrow Rd, and headed up early the next morning instead. I might as well spread it out into days, so I'll leave those for the next post!