I had a pretty ordinary sleep on my newly reconfigured mattress. Regularly, I found myself trying to balance on an inflated part and pull myself off the ground. I woke up at 11:30pm and thought there was a long way to go until morning! The advantage of that was that I was well and truly ready to get up early, and I was on the track by 6:15am. The walk up to Mt McDonald was well defined and easy to follow up to the ridge, then marked with cairns the rest of the way. I love love loved the walk along the peaks of Mt McDonald. The trail followed the ridgeline, and I felt like I was on top of the world! Yet again, I loved looking back over where I’d come from. Again, I thought how lucky I am – most people I know will never see this in real life. This was for sure one of my favourite parts of the walk.
On the way down from the west peak, I met a couple of hikers (Tim and Matt) heading to Mt Hotham. I was the first hiker they’d seen, and they were starting to wonder if anyone actually does this track! After a chat (they’re always interesting chats with random hikers!), I continued on. The trail was easy to follow and kind of cool the way it kept crossing back and forth from one side of the ridge to the other, with plenty of cairns calling out when to pay attention. At the bottom was Mt Sunday Road and a stroll to Jubble. This is the first time in all my hiking/meeting Jubble history that I haven’t got to a meeting location on the day I targeted. Whilst I was disappointed about that, it was definitely the right call (only enough daylight, water, and mobile coverage if absolutely nothing went wrong, and that would have been a silly risk to take). I was so happy to see him today! Also, I think I loved Mt McDonald more than I would have if I’d been up there worried about getting down on time. I was so happy to brush my teeth at Camp Jubbie – I’d forgotten my toothbrush!
We were catching up and chilling when Jack joined us for a brief catch-up before heading on to Mt Sunday. While we were chatting with Jack, a guy in a 4WD (Jules) stopped and joined us. Later in the afternoon, we drove towards a river to collect water for a shower and maybe even for Jubble to do some fishing. But the track down to the river was super steep, and we don’t have high clearance, so we parked close to the bottom and walked down. At the bottom, we found Jules and another guy, Eddie. We filled the shower, had a chat, then returned back to our camp (huge shout out to Jubbie, who carried the shower water back up the hill to our car!). What a wonderful shower after six days of sweaty hiking! We did all the normal camp things and had an early night. So lovely to be back at Camp Jubbie!
Kerry's Hikes 