The morning briefing was held in fine, cool conditions on Mewett Road, adjacent to Wattle Vale farm.
Jane Haar handed out some gold whistles and gold cups as part of the 'Gold' theme.
Neil Nosworthy awarded Morris Minus to Ann Nosworthy, keeping it in the family. However, Ann swiftly offloaded Morris and Neil got lumbered with the monkey on his pack again.
Dean's flag was a golden crown.
After the briefing, we set off across some of the most picturesque parts of the Mt Lofty Ranges, but it did not take long to find sections of the trail ravaged by recent fires.
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| The remains of a Heysen Trail sign still on a post |
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| A For Sale sign next to a burnt tree - you might think twice about buying |
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| The remains of another Heysen Trail sign on a burnt post |
Once we were past that area of fire damage, we are able to admire the beautiful countryside.
On a short section of road walking, we passed this ruin.
Then we wound our way along some tree lined tracks.
Next we did a bit of climbing.
We met FOHT stalwart, John Potter , doing some maintenance on Mt Gould and stopped to enjoy morning tea with him. The view was beautiful.
Soon after morning tea, we were reminded of the dangers of living in the hills, with large areas of scrub recovering from fires.
Even the pine log steps on the trail were completely destroyed.
The fire had come right to the road at this point.
More beautiful countryside followed, with some very scenic views as we climbed.
On our descent, we could see a burnt out area of plantation pine ahead of us. This meant a small detour around as walkers were forbidden to enter that area of forest.
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| Looking right as we walked down the hill........... |
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| Looking left......... |
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| Looking ahead..... |
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| Looking up...... |
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| Looking back. |
Our detour around the burnt area of forest took us straight to the dead centre of Kersbrook, where we stopped and had a late lunch.
The late lunch meant we had only a short distance to complete the day at Cudlee Creek. We walked a total of 20.4 km, being 1.5km walk-in, 18.2 km on the trail and 0.7 km walk-out.
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| Union Bridge at Cudlee Creek |
Drinks and nibbles at the end of the walk to finish another great weekend of walking with the E2E-1 group.
