Training Log Archive: jennycas

Um yeah, so it has rained a bit over the past couple of days, as evidenced by Mambray Creek - which flows all the way from Alligator Gorge - rushing past the campground. Did occur to me that this might have an impact on my plan to walk the 17-18km Hidden Gorge loop, so I wore warm woolly socks, working on the principle that even when they became wet woolly socks, they would still be warm. And they surely were, even after 10 crossings of Mambray Creek proper (knee deep, the width of a roadway, and flowing fast enough that after each traverse I could still feel the sensation of water tugging at my legs) and spending approximately 30% of the 4km Hidden Gorge section wading through the water because in a narrow gorge, the track = creek, but at least being a side creek, it wasn't so deep, except in the pools below a couple of tiny waterfalls.

After this excitement, the ascent to and long descent of The Battery ridgeline seemed a bit bland, but did give me the opportunity to reflect on the 1992 rogaine after which Susanne & I said "never again are we rogaining at Mambray Creek" which I still think is a fair assessment given the thick scratchy scrub and steep shaly hillsides - when it got dark we could see sparks striking off the rocks we'd dislodged, as they rolled down the scree slopes below us. It is a truly beautiful secluded place though, and I have been here one other time, when in 2007 I got my parents to drop me off at Alligator Gorge and I walked the 13km through the natural pound ringed by red-cliffed hills to Mambray Creek campground, and I got there before my parents who had driven around. I even saw yellow-footed rock wallabies on that occasion!

C • Rogaine 2

Since it was already 5:30 by the time I'd dropped my parents home, headed on up the hill to meet Zara for a short run in the park.

Waited for the leaden sky to finally get light enough, then went for a farewell-to-Lincoln jog; Parnkalla trail past the caravan park & grain wharf to the downtown foreshore & jetty. Admired the statue of Matthew Flinders & Trim and wondered whether ship's cats ever get seasick? Took a direct route back to the centre/summit of Kirton Point so that we could get on the road before the next lot of showers came through - and there were some incredibly heavy ones, in narrow bands moving from NW to SE. The most intense of all came through after Pt Augusta, with negligible visibility for driving and water sheeting over the road, but had finished by the time we got to the campground at Mambray Creek in Mt Remarkable NP, where I'd booked the tiny one-roomed cabin which was quite cosy, even if parents did 'complain' about having to go outside to the toilets in the night...

Perfect morning for a run from our house in Kirton Point, along Parnkalla trail out past the marina (encountering a few dead ends because I didn't *quite* remember the way through) to Billy Lights Point and back again. I'm always impressed by the fact that this marina has a fleet of commercial fishing boats berthed in the man-made waterways among the fancy houses.

Also a perfect day for collecting dad's 87-year old sister (we visited his 88-year old brother last night) and going out to Casanovas' farm on the hill above Sleaford Bay, to see what my cousin & his wife have done in the way of renovating the old farmhouse - original rooms built in 1908, but many extensions since then including the sleepout which dad helped build (he was one of 9 children; now there are only 3 of them left and we have already visited the rest in the cemetery this weekend). Dad has spent much of this trip reminiscing about the family's travels to Port Lincoln during the Jan 1939 heatwave when he was just 3...

Clearly my memories don't go back that far, but the farm was the scene of so many childhood holidays that it feels like my home too, and I have always thought that there is no better view in the world than to stand at the front gate of 'Westmere' and look down over the sheep paddocks to Sleaford Mere with the sand dunes of Wanna beyond and the rolling breakers of Sleaford Bay in the distance (I do hope they don't actually build a desal plant there!). Up close, Sleaford and Fishery Bays are an incredible blue colour in the sunshine - and Lincoln made 23 degrees today which is just amazing for June.

A bit annoyed by this one. Near Mt Dutton on the shores of Coffin Bay, a stony field where every thicket of Acacia paradoxa was lovingly mapped in its precise dimensions, as being impenetrable green with tiny "passages" in between. And the lighter green, as I understood it, would be patches of mallee (as with yesterday's map if it had actually been printed in the correct colours). Started to seem like there was an awful lot of prickly acacia in amongst the mallee though, and I took a very long time to get through any of the treed thickets, which made my route choice down the hill to the shoreline very bad indeed (would have gone more directly but I thought I wouldn't be able to get down the cliff at the bottom) and I bled time (also quite a bit of actual blood). Very much enjoyed the - sadly only two - controls in the tiny sand dune patch, then got stuck in another clump of mallee when I should have gone straight out to the rocky beach. Next control was the misplaced one, the actual location of which I guessed correctly but foolishly spent time corroborating with others.

And from there it was across a fairly open patch, looking for a control beyond a clump of mallee or so I thought, but I just couldn't find the damn trees anywhere, and eventually plunged into the prickly acacia anyway, found a dead end and had to back out, ran back down the track to convince myself that the trees really weren't there then had to fight my way through the prickle thickets again. Turns out that particular lighter green patch was just meant to indicate that the acacia wasn't quite so awful there...so I'm rather frustrated at having lost about 15 min due to physically horrible routes when I think navigationally I was doing ok!

Afterwards we detoured via Wanilla so parents could look at the hall-and-supper-room where they met at a dance 50 years ago this month!

Event: The Sandmine/Broccoli Hill OY
 

"I am going outside, and I may be some time"
This was excellent fun! Pity I didn't get my head into the map right at the beginning (was worrying about whether parents would get wet walking home from church in Lincoln) and made either actual errors or inappropriately wide bearings on the first few controls. Had a good section navigationally through the middle controls including the Broccoli Hill area (not unlike the southern end of Cantara) once I remembered how to piece together this terrain, but I was still incredibly slow and dragging bad hamstring a bit, then ran out of my own legs right before the end and made a couple of dumb control-circle mistakes.

So probably lost over 20 minutes all up, but hey, it's such beautiful challenging terrain to be in, and the map/course setting clearly such a labour of love from David Winters - and the Lincoln club had done a great job of catering too. So when I saw all the juniors heading up the big dunes on the edge of the national park, I couldn't not go too. And the slight guilty twinge at marring a pristine landscape with my footprints was quickly erased by the sheer joy of being able to launch oneself down a dune, just as I remembered doing in childhood. The wind will have erased my footprints pretty quickly anyway...

I've always been keen to see what an O map of Coffin Bay township would be like, and I wasn't disappointed. Quite a fun not-so-little course, with some patches of bushland and limestone and tiny clearings mapped. I encountered Smokey (Tim Ashman) at the misplaced control and thereafter we couldn't get away from each other, so I ran harder than I otherwise would have.

Spent the afternoon on a scenic drive out to Coffin Bay National Park, with parents reminiscing about how there used to be no proper roads through the dunes - the track basically followed the beach - in their courting days in the late '60s.

Managed to get hold of a copy of the maps from Saltbush's event in the Middleback Ranges a couple of weeks ago, also permission from the landowner, so detoured in for a run there (parents walked around the easy course, meanwhile) on our way south. An hour to myself without interacting with increasingly-deaf-and-forgetful parents was the high point in a day bookended by being informed that my credit card is already being used in the US, despite its owner not being present there for another week, and being breathalysed on the way back from collecting Blair from the airport after I'd settled parents into our Port Lincoln accommodation. At the geographical high point of the course it was possible to see all the way east across Spencer Gulf to the southern Flinders Ranges, such was the clarity of the fine winter's day!

C • Middleback Range 2