Devil of a Folly

Tuesday 12 February 2013

Devil of a good time!

Sue had been to Devils Gulch once before and was not at all keen on going there again, so she was happy to drop me off at The Springs.    The walk was a bit more adventurous than it needed to be and at one stage I thought Barad wouldn’t be pleased with the route I chose if he had been able to come on the walk. 
As I departed from The Springs two Asian girls asked if they could follow to the top of the mountain.   I told them I wasn’t going the way they would need to and thought to myself they would be in for one hell of a shock at the boulders ahead if they did go my way.  Anyway I took them to the start of the Pinnacle track and gave them some brief directions. 

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Snow gum trunk Ice House Track

 

 

With that I turned left and headed for the Ice House track.   A bit over an hour later (70 minutes actually, so somewhat off Reborn’s pace) I was overlooking the cache area.  It was a mere 60 metres off according to my GPS, but my plan was to drop into the gulch further southwest so went off in that direction.  I had been down to it and enjoyed the nice terrace of shrubs and gums on several occasions and thought it might provide a pleasant way of going to the cache site.
IMG_7946However by the time I got over all the boulders to the terrace it was about 350 metres away from the cache and eventually it was 400 metres and the woodland was now just a few scattered gums set amongst extensive boulder fields.  It was time to give the plan away and head over the boulders to the site.  On the way a huge flat boulder with the area of a small room wobbled disconcertedly, but eventually I got to a large rock wall which I reckoned would be the hiding spot.  It even had a bit that seemed to match the hint photo.  But buggar it was still 10 metres away and pointing straight through the rock wall.   Getting off the high ground I was on proved difficult and a bit backtracking was needed.
When I did manage to get to the opposite face I was encouraged when spotting broken scrub, but it still took a bit of searching.   To get here I had made the terrain into a 5, gone 800 additional metres and scrambled for 65 minutes.  It took just 8 minutes to get back to the pad where I first looked down on the cache site.   You can see the route from the attached photo.     

Devils Gulch

Scree near top of Ice House Track

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Rocky tops in Devils Gulch on way to cache

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Leptospermum – Tea Tree

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