A beautiful Winters day up in the hills, what a treat. The Mount Arthur carpark was already brimming on our early arrival, the last day before closure for three weeks. My somewhat lackadaisical approach to planning may have listed this as Medium and around 7 hours walking. The truth was somewhat embellished. So, for future reference it should thus be amended to "A wee bit past 7 and a tad more than Medium".
Happy chatter soon found us at the Hodge Creek bridge. A few metres past the bridge you barrel up the hill. It's steep to start but flattens out. Now, you can choose to follow the yellow trap line markers which will take you close to the bush edge and the final ascent up to Gordons. We started up on yellow and after about 20 minutes took a sharp left and followed old pink markers sidling along Hodges Creek before crossing it. They are a bit scant in places but will lead you to this amazing rock wall and camp site, beware the stingers though.
Hodges Creek rock shelter
Continuing, we followed the pink markers until they petered out, or else we pottered off in the wrong direction. The terrain here is pretty special, lots of sinkholes and vegetative mounds and ledges you climb onto to skirt around. All peppered by rock formations. Slow travel, but beautiful too. We made our way by GPS to pt 1090, choosing to stay between two creeks, a wise move indeed as we climbed out of egg box topography and into open beech forest. With still a few hundred metres to climb to the summit of Gordons we intersected the yellow tagline again and encountered two Friends of Flora helpers checking trap lines who seemed surprised to see us in such a remote part of the park. Leaving them to their task we continued up the spur that gently led us to the bushline at 1300m.
Lunch with a view
Breaking out we were pleased to see the sun and after the last hard steep climb through tussock to the ridge we plopped down out of the cool breeze for a late lunch. Back on familiar terrain we then followed the badly eroded track from Gordons back to the Mt Arthur track, with a few more undulations than our addled brains could recall. The last of us got back to Flora carpark just as darkness descended. We were on the go for nearly 9 hours and Strava computed about 25km with 1250m of climbing, a decent day's work.
Venturing were Andrea (Leader & scribe), Era, Penny, Marie, Chris, Don, Nicola, Oliver, Kath and Mike. Thank you all, you were awesome company.