Camping in Katoomba - Part I

The six foot track was made in the 1880's as a bridle track through the Megalong valley from Katoomba to the Jenolan caves. It's only 45km and used as the track for a marathon every year, but Jen and I wanted to stretch out our time until our next HelpX rendezvous, so we decided to spend 4 days and 3 nights on the trail.

When we set out hiking about 5 km along the highway out of Katoomba to reach the trail head it was still quite foggy. Here we are a few minutes down the trail.

The lookdown over the Megalong valley was almost too foggy to see anything. Almost, but not quite.

Here's Jen looking over it.

And here is the exact same view about 45 seconds later.

The walk down into the valley was incredibly.....tall. And beautiful.

From the first hour of walking we thought that the environment would be similar to that of our first hike.

But soon the sky cleared and we found ourselves walking through rolling pasture land.

When we got to our campsite for the first night, we were disappointed to discover that it had road access and there were several families car camping. They were very friendly and had great kids, though, so we weren't so grumpy after all. Here's Jen with our excellent dinner of polenta with cheese and peanuts!

The next day we met an elderly man who was running the entire trail in 10 hours (or that was his plan). He seemed to be in excellent shape and we were very impressed.

A few hours later we got to this precarious bridge. The bridge is actually for use when the river is too high for the lower crossing, but it was so cool we decided to use it anyway.

On the other side of the river, we found a nice place to eat lunch. Dave's hair was getting kind of long, and he didn't get it together to get a cheap haircut in Vietnam, so we decided that the forest was a great place to cut Dave's hair. And our lunch spot was also a very nice haircut location. It looked great!

A little further along, we saw this awesome reptile try and climb up a tree.

The day was blue an beautiful as we reached almost the top of our climb. Here's the trail seemingly descending, though there will be another steep ascent soon afterwards for us.

This was the greenest tree I'd ever seen (the photo has not be altered in any way).
Our camping spot for the 2nd night was in this beautiful meadow. It was protected from the main trail by high bushes and had a perfect spot in the river for bathing. It was also far from any roads, so we were quite happy.

Our adventures continue in part II....