24th January 2025
This was a return venture on a walk I did the first year the club was established. You can read about that trip on an earlier report. Had much changed? Well the answer to that is no. The scenery is still beautiful, the track is still overgrown and the company was great.
I took Henry again as this walk is in the Victoria Forest Park and dogs are allowed with a permit and its a great one for him to stretch his legs, jump over logs swim in the river and ascend and cross the swing bridges. He’s such an explorer and I think he loved his time tramping.
This year I was accompanied by Jason, Rose & Garth. I decided to camp and brought my MRS Hubba Hubba as there are some nice spots to pitch near the hut. The hut in actual fact had been refreshed by the Love Your Huts programme sponsored by FMC and Permolat had built a new wood chuck and stocked it full of firewood ready for winter.
While Garth, Rose and I crossed the Robinson river on foot at the beginning, Jason wanted to do the swing bridge to conquer his fear of them. Its almost a vertical climb to get to the swing bridge on the northern side and certainly you would do this route in a flood but with normal flow you might as well cross the river at the point you can see the large slip on the other side of the bank. You then walk up and under the swing bridge to get onto the main marked track.
I’m not going to go into the rest of the track as i’ve covered this in my previous trip report but this time we mostly walked up the river on the way in, traversing onto the flats when we could. This in actually took us longer with breaks at about 5hrs30 than the way out where we followed the track most of the time and made better progress with a 4hr exit time.
I think everyone had a great time and i’ll be taking Henry back in the future. Something that would make the trip better is not having to do the initial walk around the farm fencing for the first 40 minutes. I might try and track down the owner of this land and see if we can drive straight to the point where you descend into the bush.
Euan Mackenzie (Member)