Broken Hill 26 September 2015

Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary: Tramp No 161

Broken Hill 26 September 2015

Spring is here and I haven't been tramping since early May. As usual, time and weather have been against me as well as lack of motivation to do the hard yards involved in struggling up hills. Harley sent several emails tempting me out over the winter and I finally succumbed to his invitations. Looking at Broken Hill on Topo maps, it looked innocuous enough for an easyish  trip to ease myself back into tramping for the season.

Broken Hill is a stand alone lump just south of Purple Hill and Lake Pearson and east of Mt Wall and Mt Cockayne in the Cragiburn Ranges and reaches the lofty height of 1486M.

Four of us set off along the four wheel drive track on a cool and partly cloudy day. This track was designated The Narnia Track in reference to the movie that was filmed in these parts several years ago. After a couple of kilometers we branched off on another road not shown on my topo map but visible on Google earth, which took us into the area where we could access the part of the hill we wanted to climb. This track took us through the burnt out wilding pine forest that had been hit by a large fire a couple of years back and had an interesting beauty of it's own but wouldn't have looked out of place in some Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Movie. We leave the track and wend our way through the burnt trees heading for a low saddle from which to access the ridge we wish to ascend. Part way up the ridge to the point 1355 we stop to regroup and have first lunch, there is a light but quite cold South East wind keeping us cool and well wrapped up. The tops are pretty easy travel and mostly flat with the occasional rock scramble as we attained Broken Hill itself and enjoyed the views and took the obligatory photos.The route down involves continuing along the South West ridge before dropping off through an easy bush bash through very open beech forest and linking to another farm track below, although we kinda missed our connection at first. Finally it's a longish slog along the farm road back to the car through a thick forest of wilding pines. Anyway, this trip ended up a little longer than I thought it would as we ended up walking 17.9KM and climbing overall 1185M in 7 hours 21 minutes. I coped pretty well considering.