Going Bush... again

Friday morning dawned clear, calm, crisp..... and COLD. It was -4 degrees according to the car's external thermometer just before we set off on another tramp. Crisp mornings like that lead to great photos though, and once we'd been walking for about 20 minutes we weren't particularly cold anymore.


The first part of the tramp was nice and easy, with a marked trail that worked its way around Lake Sylvan (pictured below), after starting lower down the same valley as the well known Routeburn track.


The first half an hour was the tramping equivalent of a 4-lane highway... wide, flat, with bridges across the little streams and a gravel track. Once leaving Lake Sylvan it turned into a proper tramping track - with markers every hundred metres or so and no bridges to speak of, until we reached the Rockburn river. We spent a bit of time and energy keeping our feet dry on this section of track (avoiding bogs and finding good stream crossing points) which soon proved to be a bit of a waste of time.


After the Rockburn, the trail was not marked at all. We made our way down to the Dart River Flats and walked upstream to the Beans Burn river, using map, compass, GPS and a bit of common sense.


We walked across Beans Burn (up to our waists in snow melt - i.e. not overly tropical) and (eventually) found the marked trail up to the flats halfway up the valley.


We reached our camp site shortly before the sun went behind the surrounding hills. Of all of the thousands of acres of national park that we were in, we were a little bit disappointed to have a couple of hunters pitch their tent 50m from ours... but there's not a lot we can do about that!



The plan for Saturday was to explore further up Beans Burn, camp in the same location, and then walk out on Sunday. However, we woke up on Saturday morning to discover wet, warm weather, which meant large amounts of snow melt and rising rivers. So we packed up quickly and headed back down the valley to get across the Beans Burn river prior to the waters rising too much. Everyone else in the valley had the same idea - we met others heading hastily down the valley (including some who needed to cross the Dart - which is a FAR bigger river to cross).

We thoroughly enjoyed it, even with cutting the tramp short by a day. We got to know more of the locals... i.e. deer, birds, and the local flying elephants (sand flies). We got our own back on the sand flies though, we're both pretty sure we ate as many of them with our dinner as they ate of us. Extra protein.