South Cape Track - Day 3 - The Ironbounds

Saturday, 2 January 2021

Day 3 started at 12:20am when Jon heard some suspicious rustling outside the tents. Luckily for the rest of us, he got up to investigate and discovered that what he first thought was a tassie devil, but turned out to be a quoll, was munching on one of our bags of snacks. This was odd, given all the food was packed away in tents for the night.  What was even odder was that our entire lunch bag, held in Jett's tent, was strewn about the campsite.  A bit more of a look around and the situation became clearer - the bastard quoll had sliced through the side of Jett's tent while he slept, dragged the lunch bag out through the hole, then proceeded to consume what it could. Luckily our cheese, salami and other lunch items were contained in hardier plastics than the zip-lock bags, so our only real loss was the damage to Jett's tent, and some nuts.  

Jon woke us all to let us know of the situation so we could defend our food for the rest of the night. Rob claimed he spent the rest of the night hugging his food to his body, while Jon and I made sure to pack all our remaining food into his pack which we put between us in our (luckily spacious) tent.  It looked like a disaster had been averted.

In the morning I got up to go to the toilet at 6.30, and I met Rob who was standing on the trail holding a packet of pasta in his hand and looking confused.  My first thought that he was still traumatised by the thought of losing his food so he was perhaps reluctant to let go of it, but then I realised that this looked a lot like Paul's emergency pasta packet and Rob had found it on the trail.

A quick scan of the area and I started to see more of Paul's food spread around the forest behind the tents, including his whole food bag and the very scarce remains of a 400g bag of nuts and m&ms (carefully prepared by Clare) and a few other emptied ziplock bags.  At about this time, Paul woke up and discovered the huge slash in the side of his tent.  He'd clearly slept through another raid (in all likelyhood this happened before Jett's).  All in all he lost most of his lunch stuff,  all his snacks & meusli bars and half his breakfast oats.  He was left with the single main meal he carried for all of us (phew), some of his back heat packs which I'd found in the forest,  half a packet of lunch wraps, and that emergency packet of pasta that Rob had found.  I think Paul hadn't really registered what had happened at midnight so he was completely shocked and outraged at this discovery in the morning.   Later we had visions of a quoll with such a distended stomach that it lounged around on Paul's heat packs recovering for the rest of the day.  After yesterdays rain soaking and tent incompetencies and today's food crisis we really were starting to feel like complete hiking chumps - which was a weird scenario given how much hiking experience we actually have between us.

Before we set off some other hikers who were on their second last day gave us some more porrige oats which was nice. Once Paul was placated,  and the tents were repaired with ankle strapping tape, we packed up and headed off.  We had the hardest day ahead of us - the crossing of the Ironbound ranges.

With 900 or so metres of climb in around 5km of hiking, it was a pretty steep ascent, but the track was good - there were lots of steps and it was generally dry. We took it steadily with a few rest breaks and we were pretty much up on the plateau after 3 hours. We'd heard many stories of huge winds forcing people to crawl the final 1.5k across the plateau before descending but we were pretty lucky with the weather, the clouds were low and while there were certainly strong gusts, they weren't enough to bother us really. It was cold at the top but we were prepared with all our warm and rain clothes handy.

It was nice to traverse the alpine plateau and have the ascent behind us, but we still had the descent - which was even more notorious.  It's hard to imagine how hard a 900m descent in about 7km could be but it really was a battle.  The track went straight down through muddy tree-rooty rain forest. Every step was hard and we had to climb over a million branches and tree roots, crawl under other branches, battle through the mud and often do all three things at once.  It was absolutely grueling and took us what seemed like hours.  When the track finally stopped going straight down and turned to skirt around the headland the going got even harder with steep muddy descents into gullies followed by equally steep muddy ascents.  With exhausted legs and minds this was a real test of resolve!  

After about 4 hours it finally got easier and the last km or so was easy.  We were delighted to arrive in Little Deadmans Bay after a solid 7 hours of walking. 

The campsite was really nice and we set about washing our gear and settling in for a well deserved rest. The sea was calm so Paul had a swim in the bay while the rest of us just washed our legs.

We had one of my prepared dinners for our evening meal - Marakesh Curry which was a big improvement on Day 1's attempt (although it was barely evening when we ate it but we were all exhausted and keen to get to bed immediately).  I'd say we were in bed well before 8. Just before we tucked ourselves in, the companion of a hiker from Port Douglas who was on her way back out (having walked all the way into Melaluca and beyond in the previous 10 days) arrived. He'd just walked 27kms for the day to catch up to her - all the way from our first night's camping spot. I said - 'gosh that's a big day' and he said 'not compared to the previous two'! It turned out he'd been doing some pretty serious bush bashing near Bathurst Harbour while his companion rested her blistered feet.   By this time we were also still together with LightPackers but the HeavyPackers and FamilyOfFive had diverted to a beach campsite the previous day. Anyway it turned out this guy had lost his phone during his adventures which included the number of the people he was staying with in Hobart.  He didn't know their surnames, or have a clue about their address so he was going to have to drive around looking for familiar land marks when he returned!  We quizzed him and decided that he was likely staying in South Hobart given his description of a chemist, IGA, and cricket ground cut into the side of a hill, but we couldn't help him more than that! They had massive plans to walk up Precipitous Bluff (almost as high as Mt Wellington) via a taped (but not tracked) trail, and that's after a 5km lagoon wade just to get to the bottom. After that they were going to traverse Moonlight Ridge (somewhere I'd never heard of) and pop out on the Cockle creek road with just a pleasant 20kms stroll back to their car.  Good Grief!  It was so nice to lie in bed and know that we had the Ironbounds behind us (and that we didn't have Precipitous Bluff ahead of us!).

Oh - and if you are wondering how Paul went without any lunch or snacks - we were able to re-ration our own supplies so it was easy enough to provide enough stuff for all of us. It's a good thing we weren't miserly with our provisioning.