Tarkine Day 2 - lost and found

Sunday, 22 January 2023

As I hoped we got to sleep in on Saturday.  We had a delicious breakfast together then we all set out to try to walk some of the trails marked very stylistically over an arial photograph of the area.  It's gotta be a bad sign when the tracks are squished into the A4 page and suspiciously smooth.

Our first attempt to find the start of the Heritage trail failed abysmally after a few attempts.

Not long after we had given up, we bumped into the former owner, now part time caretaker and on-site resident who suggested we attempt one of the other tracks she thought would be better marked. We took her advice and found the 100 metres of boardwalk that existed at the start of the Mother Myrtle track. 

From there we managed to locate and follow the pink tapes representing the Double Dip track which didn't so much mark the track, but the route through the forest that once was the track.  In some parts it was really tricky to find the next tape so we kept having to search around as every direction looked equally likely (or unlikely) and the track often took very abrupt turns.  

It took us over 2 hours to do quite a short walk in the end but it was still fun.

After a relaxed late lunch back at the lodge, then some more chill time (the lodge and its beautiful views lent itself very well to simply sitting and admiring the view), Jon, Andrew and I headed out for a run. We figured we could incorporate what we'd learnt from the morning and try to string a few of the tracks together using our new pink-tape-spotting skills.  

It started pretty well. We managed to mostly run the two tracks we'd done in the morning in about half an hour, then I thought we could give the elusive Heritage Track a go - starting from the opposite end this time.  Jon bailed out, citing achillies issues, leaving me and Andrew as the only adventurers. I figured we'd be 20-30 minutes.

It all started well. In fact it all went well for the first 3/4 of what we thought would be the length of the trail - we were really careful about not continuing if we hadn't seen the next tape, so in some cases it was a bit of a tape hunt, but we generally made good progress.  

Then we had a good few minutes where it took us ages to find a tape as the track turned sharply to our right.  We found it eventually but it got harder and harder to locate them, particularly where new trees had fallen. We felt we were weaving through the forest haphazardly and despite following tapes we started to lose confidence that we were even following them in the right direction.  Strava confirms this zig zagging:

After about half an hour of wild direction changes and confusion we had lost the tapes completely so we decided to just use my phone compass and head south so we'd hit the road.   Luckily the rainforest was quite penetrable so it wasn't too hard to stay on a rough course. Not long before we hit the road we spotted the tapes again (goodness knows where they had been), so a few minutes later we popped out on the lodge road with 10 minutes to run to get home. Our 20-30 minutes was more like 90 minutes. I'm not sure I would have felt the same way if I was by myself, but I found the whole experience really fun.  Having to hunt for tapes and rely on our wits and my compass was kind of cool, especially as it all ended well (we didn't have mobile coverage so calling for help was never going to be an option).  

We returned to the lodge to find everyone else was up to the phase of vaguely discussing what action they might take should we not arrive home, but no-one was particularly worried about us yet - particularly as our predicament was pretty predictable!  They rightly figured we'd make our way back eventually.

After a nice shower and a rest I had the nice bar-man serve me a strong drink:

Then a bit later we sat down for a delicious roast vegetable (and meat) dinner cooked mostly by Teri - it was delicious. As was Jon's apricot crumble we had for dessert.

Then we managed to stay up late enough to see a gorgeous sunset. It was a really lovely evening after a day of adventures.