2013 Trip Note

Pack Carry: 19-21 July 2013 - Nature at its best in the Warby Ranges

Contributor: Dianne McKinley

Source: "The News", August 2013

Photogallery: Nature at its best in the Warby Ranges

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This gentle midwinter pack carry into the Warbies led by Bob Oxlade proved to be a real taste of what nature has to offer the pack carrier. Friday night’s camp at Taminick Gap was a mild induction to the weekend weather with rain falling overnight while we were safely ensconced inside tents and warm sleeping bags. Saturday morning we crossed the road for a hike up Mt Glenrowan where we found on a side trip to Chick Hill a very big koala checking us out in a nearby low tree branch. From the 514 metre peak of Mt Glenrowan great views were had down over the town, where Ned Kelly and gang used to sit on horseback checking out the old coach road routes. On the walk down the weather turned again, with drenching rain and cold – a taste of what was to continue over the next day.

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Saturday afternoon we relocated to start the pack carry along Salisbury Track and had a steep steady climb up the Salisbury Falls, flowing well with the downpours, along a pretty forest route and then on the Friends Track over Mt Warby, with views east to Lake Mokoan. At Wenham’s camp that evening, flames from the fire Bob painstakingly lit were a distant vista as we huddled to cook under the toilet shelter while it poured down sleety rain and cats and dogs in freezing conditions all evening and well into the night.

On Sunday we woke to a crispy cold morning and navigated cross country through the granite boulder ranges to a large area of fully skirted 2–3 metre grass trees (xanthorrhoea australis) which grow only 1cm annually. The return walk was on the Friends Circuit with lunch at Kwat Kwat lookout over the Wangaratta township, and then along the Alpine View track looking out to Mts Buffalo, Cobbler and Bogong.

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Over the weekend in this arid zone without much undergrowth we saw the beginnings of wild flowers and wattles, acacias, orchids and grevillea. Also there were lots of big grey roos and some wallabies, the curious big koala, and many birds including scarlet crested wrens, white throated tree wrens, willy wag tails, turquoise parrots, currawongs, eastern rosellas, crimson rosellas and treecreepers.

The total distance for the weekend was 32 km. Bob was the clever leader of the small group made up of Dianne, Debbie and Ian.