Walking the Wollemi wilderness

It's the state's second largest national park at half a million hectares, it's been described as an area for adventuring almost without peer, and it's only 100km from Sydney. Parts are extremely rugged and inaccessible, and indeed only a few years ago the dinosaur era Wollemi pine was rediscovered after being lost for 70 million years. In the past five years alone, several hundred sites of aboriginal rock art have been discovered too.

So far I've only done fairly brief forays into the outer edges, and Sunday's outing with the bushwalking club was another such one. But we were walking off track for much of the way, and it was indeed fairly wild, tough and testing. We weren't quite put to the test of an unplanned night in the bush, but the slower than expected progress meant we only just made it back up the trackless creek beds and cliff passes onto the relative safety of the ridge top before nightfall and a tentative torchlit procession back to the cars.

The walk, in the Culoul Range north of Colo Heights, and taking in a descent to the Colo River gorge and an exploration of Boorai Creek and the Pulpit, is described in a book that fearless leader Liam had with him that was apparently full of such Wollemi walks. I must track down a copy for myself. These are my types of walks.

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