Last weekend was Van‘s first adventure. We drove out to Alpine country, to the Mt Howitt carpark. There were lots of nice hilly twisty dusty rocky roads for me to relearn my manual driving skills on – that’s right, Van is not an automatic.
After arriving Thursday evening, we hiked out to MacAlister Springs on Friday morning. There we set up camp, and visited the Loo with a View, before packing for a day ‘walk’.
Our plan was to descend down into Terrible Hollow, via Devil’s Staircase, then head up one of the spurs onto Crosscut Saw, and back to camp again. Anyone who’s read John Marsden’s Tomorrow when the war began books will recognise those as Hell, Satan’s Steps, and Tailor’s Stitch respectively. Anyway, we found it was a lot easier to get down into Terrible Hollow than they made out in the Tomorrow books – although we only went down near the Devil’s Staircase, not on them (a route I like to refer to as the piker’s variant).
As we reached the depths of Hell, it had been raining on us on and off, after rumbling thunder most of the morning. It was fairly foggy, and we fought our way through evil spiky ferns and stinging nettles, until finally the terrain cleared up as we got partway up the spur onto Crosscut Saw.
One kilometre of slogging up a steep spur later, we were on top of Crosscut Saw. Joy. Back to camp for dinner, we’d only covered 12km that day, but needed a good nights sleep before the epic the next day.
