Cathedral Rock & Montague Thumbs Loop - take 2

Wednesday, 26 February 2020

Update:  this person got lost the day after I walked this. In fact, they were getting lost AS I wrote this blog post. 

The last time I did this loop was in June 2017.  Back then it was a clear day but quite cold and the vegetation was soaking wet from overnight rain - which meant that I was also pretty wet and cold for most of it.  On top of that I made some navigational mistakes (because I didn't have a map), and my phone went flat about halfway through.  Everything turned out fine but I felt that things could have easily gone quite wrong so after that day I resolved to be a bit more safety conscious particularly when doing solo adventures.  I also bought a more suitable jog-hiking pack which could fit things like a spare battery, map and my epirb.

Thus I was well equipped when I set off to repeat the loop this time around. The forecast was for hot weather so I left really early and added a snake bite bandage to my pack. 

The first part of the walk goes beside the North West Bay River. I thought these moss-rocks looked really cool:

After a few ks it starts the relentless climb up to Cathedral Rock. It's tough but steady, and I was there after about 1hr 15 minutes. The views were lovely.

but a bit windy..

From there the track traverses the ridge which is really narrow in parts and goes up and down over the Montague Thumbs

before descending via about 3ks of really overgrown trail to Wellington Falls.  It's so overgrown that it's quite hard work staying on it -  sometimes it's marked with tiny cairns, other times with small bits of electrical tape and sometimes you just have to look for the most well worn bit of ground.  It was really nerve racking the first time I did it but easier this around that's for sure. 

Again, at Wellington Falls there wasn't all that much water so it was easy to jump across the river and keep dry feet.

Then I had the easiest (and my favourite) section of track - the 2.5k stretch from the falls to the Pipeline track.

Then it's straight across the pipeline and down the insanely steep Siphon Track. How this section of pipeline was built is beyond me as it's almost vertical in some parts and the track is raised in sections and dug into the slope in other sections - like a train track. It's amazing.  In fact I've just done some research and it was built in the early 1900s, when people were tough and also clearly very thirsty.

After 15 minutes of crazy descent I was back at North West Bay River with just a couple of kilometres left to run.  I got back to the car at about 11am, after just under 4 hours of hiking including small stops.    It was a fun morning out, and something I'd been meaning to do for ages.