The Australian Walking Track Grading System measures experience required, steps, gradient, path quality, and signage to scale tracks according to difficulty. Day 2 (Eagle Waterhole to Tapanappa) is a 13km grade-five bushwalk which the trailnotes describe as “challenging”.
It is regarded as the toughest day of the hike. But to begin with it was all sunshine and open skies.
We left Eagle Waterhole along a rising firetrail for a couple of kilometres before veering off into bushland where we enjoyed semi-pleasant walking up and down steep, scrubby valleys.
A fellow hiker ambled past and returned my sunglasses which I’d dropped at Cape Jervis. Bonus! And lifting our spirits, it remained sunny (albeit windy and cold).
You can’t tell from the picture, but that cloud band is moving fast and straight at us.
We made good time down the waterlogged track to the coast with just enough rain to be annoying, and strong winds that tugged and pushed us close to the sheer edges of the track.
We stopped for lunch and water-resupply at Trig Campground, where the wind intensified to hard and very cold.
Eating hot Mexican Chilli Beans mixed with jerky warmedeverything up except my son’s mood. He was limping and subdued after a slip on the trail. He insisted he was okay, but we still had 8km of grade-five to go.
From Trig we descended to Deep Creek Waterfall and rockhopped across. Starting the zig-zagging climb out, we swapped places twice with a trio who — bloody liars — told us we were only “20 minutes” from the end.
This seemed optimistic, but we were spent and hopeful, thus enraged by the stupidly unnecessary looping track that finally led us to Cliffs Campground an hour later.
Dropping our packs, sore and more than a little bit wet, we found the best thing about Cliffs wasn’t the view (no view) it was the phone reception!
I called my wife and passed on birthday wishes to The Little Elf, who turned six today. My son used my phone to ring his wife, reassuring her that her PawPaw Lip Balm was being put to good use.
Then came the single most fateful thing I did the entire trip: I used my powerbank to recharge my phone.
We ate stuff, dried stuff, and both slept in the shelter.
My son’s bottle of whiskey took the edge off the hardship, and we both slept well even though it rained mercilessly all night and settled in to become (we’d later discover) the coldest day in four years.
And for us the most dangerous.