Camping Part 3

On the 2nd morning, we packed up camp again. We discovered that the trail we were going to hike was closed, so we decided that instead we'd hike north and exit one town north of Blackheath on the rail line and take the train back.

One of the things we liked best about the Grosse valley is how big all the vegetation is.

Even though it was a dry morning, all the plants were still wet and we were totally soaked for the first few hours because we had to push our way past plants taller than us in many places on the trail.

Here's Jen squeezing the water from her socks.

We found a nice spot along the river to stop for lunch.

Here's another shot of our lunch spot from a rock near the center of the stream.

There were lots of these beautiful beetles, which our hosts later told us were called Christmas beetles because they only come out during Christmas time.

A few hours after lunch, we lost our trail. It took us up a hill and then dissolved entirely. Here's where we dropped our packs to try and figure it out. (Eventually we discovered an earlier fork we had missed with our real trail on it).

We got to our campsite around 3 or 4, and had a little snack in the nearby stream.

I also found an awesome bug that had caught a ride on my backpack.

On our way out the next morning we found this sign for hikers coming in.

It definitely seemed a pretty rough track to us =)

We also found these delicious-looking creatures on the way out! There were tons of them in the pools leading up to the falls where we exited.

After a fairly strenuous climb out of the valley, we still had to hike about 10km into town to take the train back. So we hiked for several hours down a road that looked like this for pretty much the entire way:

We made it to the train station around 1pm, just in time for one of the hourly trains headed back towards Blackheath.

We're planning on doing another 3-day hike around this area sometime soon--either during or right after Christmas. That's it for now!