I’m fine with hiking. Day hiking, The kind where you need only schlepp some water, snacks that you are blissfully ignorant constitute more than double the calories you will burn in a day hike and the Wet Ones that you have carried as a precaution ever since a hiking mate suffered a bowel blowout on the Masons Falls trail in 2015. I’m also fine with camping, however it tends to err on the glamping side and is somewhat dicey given I lumber around like a graceless yak in confined spaces. Hiking and camping?
Nope.
A friend had suggested a two day hike to Beeripmo in the Mount Cole State Forest – a 22ish km hike in and out of a bush camp.
Inaccessible by road means carrying all food and lodgings on your back. If I wanted to do that I’d be a turtle.
However I was in a state of physical breakdown and somehow thought that a day or two of fresh air and bush scenery would blow out some cobwebs. A floating skerrick of meniscus freeballing around my kneecap had slowed down my running training to a distance and pace that was less than a six year old would clock at school during morning recess. Some kind of weird virus had been rolling through my body for several days unleashing alternating bouts of sweats and chills. Somehow I thought that operating at this sub-par level was the ideal foundation for a fairly brutal two day hike.
So next minute we’re arriving in Beaufort which I last remember as a breakfast stop on a road trip to the Barossa Valley in those heady early days of a new relationship. I suspected that nothing in the next 36 hours would resemble anything like that trip. We found ourselves hoe-ing into a steak, bacon and cheese pie at the bakery, having made a pact before we’d even cleared the West Gate bridge that nothing short of a country baked pie would do as prep for this shindig. A charming older chap on a bowls club excursion looked a little askance at our breakfast until I pointed at my fresh-off-the-shelf Kathmandu hiking pants and justified this pastry indulgence as the LAST SUPPER before two days in the bush.
The most blessed thing about this whole arrangement was that we were going with a guided group. A guided group that would loan you the back-pack, tent and sleeping mat, to avoid me investing in ANOTHER bunch of gear. Gear that would likely prove short-lived and result in more expensive stuff joining my 1990s ski gear (used one season), my 2000s wet suit (used one water skiing weekend) and the obsolete hiking backpack (used for one weekend) back in the era where backpacks had clunky aluminium stabilising parts. When it comes to outdoor activities, I’m the ultimate Tinder-style commitment-phobe – short term invested, long term uninterested.
We met our guide Sarah (not her real name) in a Beaufort car park where I surveyed the loaned gear and sized up the ability of a rucksack already packing a tent and sleeping mat to accommodate my other stuff. I was IMMENSELY proud of how lightly I’d packed. Bare minimum clothing layers. Bamboo eating utensils I’d swiped from a lunch venue the day before. Only one mobile phone. A bottle of Rose that had been decanted into a lightweight plastic bottle. 340 grams of Jaffas. My only issue was my sleeping bag. Sometime, many years ago, in that age of over-investing in outdoor activities, my innate fear of cold had prompted me to purchase a sleeping bag that would hold its own in the Antarctic, but had not seen the benefit of modern day research into more lightweight thermal components. It was not a hiking sleeping bag, but it was my only option. From the moment I tried to get it into the backpack, it was dubbed ‘The Wombat’ as it appeared to behave exactly like a robust struggling marsupial when trying to be inserted into a confined space.
With The Wombat eventually wrangled into submission, we drove to the Richards campsite and car park which is the starting point for the Beeripmo walk. Clever people had elected to go no further and were happily relaxing in campsites within strolling distance of their vehicles and within 20 minutes of the pie shop.
Apparently we were not those people.
I don’t know how to describe the first day of hiking, except to say it was uphill. Relentlessly uphill. Zig-zagging because only mountain goats could go straight-up, uphill. Meniscus-searing, sweat into your hairline, trudgingly uphill. Sarah encouraged all of us to take moments to stop to observe the stunning forest scenery which was the most beautiful code for ‘if you think you might cry about the uphill-ness, just stop and look at the ferns’
Of course, views are GREAT when you go uphill. Uphill also means that unless you are departing by helicopter, there will at some point be some downhill.
Just when I’d lost the will to live, a sign signalling ‘Beeripmo Camp – 500m’ came into view.
At this point I want to digress into how flagrantly loose this whole hiking gig is when it comes to distances. As a long distance runner, I worship at the altar of Garmin. The Garmin boffins and their investment in satellites mean that I always know how far I’ve travelled and how fast. Knowing that a half marathon is 21.1km and a marathon 42.2km means there’s a really good sense of how much more torture is in store before it’s over. After each year’s Melbourne Marathon there is an outcry from a certain percentage of marathon participants who declare loudly on social media that ‘The Course Was Long’ because their Garmins clocked up 110 metres further than the regulation distance. The people in charge of hiking distances do not care for such accuracy. I guess they assume that if you’ve hiked relentlessly uphill, telling you that there’s 500m to camp when it could be more like 750 is just a matter of rounding.
Anyhow, 500 metres plus or minus (ie plus) 250m we were at camp. My friend with way more outdoors experience, coached me through the straightforward process of erecting a lightweight hiking tent. Amazingly, it was simpler, and there were fewer moving parts than operating my food processor. It was super-super cold and I piled on every layer I’d carted up the stupid hills, only wondering for a moment whether it was acceptable to romp around camp wearing The Wombat as an oversized poncho. Next priority was finding wood for the campfire. I operated at ‘kindling’ level, with some of camp-mates doing a far better job by venturing further afield and gathering actual logs.
At this point, Sarah the guide started to produce actual miracles from her backpack. She operates at ‘Magic Faraway Tree Land of Goodies’ level. .
This included two litres of red wine – at which point I felt inclined to applaud. On top of a cheese platter, sticky date pudding with caramel sauce, a vegie curry with cous-cous and S’Mores made of marshmallows wedged between chocolate wheatens pre-wrapped in foil for ease of campfire toasting, I would have sold my first born child in appreciation (if I had one) to be able to keep Sarah on staff at my house.
I can’t go past this point without mentioning the gluten-free vegans. A husband and wife on our trek had declared themselves gluten-free vegans. I’m in awe of those whose beliefs are strong enough to endure a life without cheese. I’m genuinely sorrowful for those whose gut health denies them the joy of warm sourdough. However these two had beliefs and digestive systems that were apparently entirely discretionary based on how they relaxed their restrictions on this trip, devouring oozy brie, canned tuna and wraps rampantly riddled with gluten. Their box-ticking at the start of the trip meant that we collectively carted a slab of gluten free bread, a packet of gluten-cookies and an inordinate amount of chickpeas up that hill and back down again, a sad collective of ingredients that were about as desirable as my 2000s water-skiing wetsuit.
Night fell. The campfire was all out of fuel by 7:48pm which meant we all retired to our tents. I was incredibly fearful of being cold, but my investment in layers, my Antarctic-grade sleeping bag and my peri-menopausal body meant I was beyond toasty. When it comes to a vast-amount of tent-time before Sunday departure, my more experienced friend had invested in two things that, as a rookie, I had not. 1. A lightweight, yet suitably distracting Mills and Boons novel. 2. A miracle device you can use to charge your phone without power. This meant that while she had adequate distraction in the witching hours between sunrise and when everyone emerges from tents, I had nothing to look at except my sleeping bag washing instructions.
Sunday morning. We were subject to oppressive mist and the inefficiency of newbie hiker-campers who don’t understand that Sunday is about express consumption of muesli and getting the hell off the mountain.
My ‘what goes up must go down’ wish came true except for a short side trip to a lookout over Mt Langhi Ghiran. I knew all about Mt Langhi Ghiran, not geographically but via exposure to its rather excellent wine label.
Day two was boringly downhill. One of my 1990s hiking boots suffered the kind of blowout that keeps Daniel Riccardo off the podium.
The front sole unexpectedly dislocated itself and got so flappy that I had to walk like a pensioner with a hip replacement to keep the uncontrolled front bit from tripping me. Given I’m an inexpert hiker at best, I was eminently grateful to survive this equipment failure. Last time I was so challenged on a trail I fell, destroying a beautiful pair of Michael Kors sunglasses and enduring nine stitches to my forehead inserted under local anesthetic in an outback health clinic.
Thankfully, I was shortly back in the Richards car park, smugly marinating in hiking endorphins and drafting a triumphant Facebook post.
I want to declare that I will do this again, but the fact it took me till Wednesday to navigate stairs means maybe I won’t.
Post script: Made it down the mountain without damage, Followed those closely studied sleeping bag washing instructions. Whilst trying to hand-wash The Wombat in the bath, my forehead had a high-impact encounter with the bath tap, resulting in bruising, bleeding and loss of skin – a nice little reminder of the risks of outdoor endeavours.