Uncle Roddus Tramping diary: Tramp No. 173
Mt lucia - 25th January 2020.
This CTC tramp was programmed in to the schedule by the leader as he believed this was one part of the Libretto Range that the club had seldom, if ever, visited. Mt Lucia was center of the range with the club running regular visits to Faust at the Southern end and Trovatore at the Northern End.
It was forecast to be a fairly warm day with the possibility of showers late in the day. Nine trampers arrived at Riordons Creek about 10:30am, quickly donning our tramping gear before the sandflys swarmed and hit the bush on the north side of Riordons creek. No tracks to follow on this trip, so it was a bush bash up the 600M to the bushline. The group stopped a couple of time to regroup us stragglers on a fairly easy bushbash with the occasional areas of thicker scrub in some parts. About 2 hours to the bush line where we stopped for lunch in slightly spitting rain. It had been very muggy on the climb up so a lot of sweating had occurred, especially this scribe.
We started off again on the next 400M to get to the top of Lucia via point 1689. It was a pretty straight forward climb through the tussock although the wind did pick up on the tops to warrant putting on wind protection after out stop on Mt Lucia. Discussion was had as to what route we were going to take to get back to the cars, either back the way we came of head south to point 1701 and drop down the ridge south of Roirdons Creek. The tops traverse was mostly pleasant except for the wind but we made it back down to the bush line about 3:30pm. Unfortunately, it was while waiting at this point that one of our party who had lagged a bit behind, somehow managed to bypass the point at which we waited and continued on down the hill still thinking she was following the rest of us. After almost a half hour of waiting we realised something had gone astray and started looking back where she was last seen and using calls and whistles to see if she was still nearby. The decision was made, as we had no idea what had happened to her, to set off a locator beacon. Some of the party, including the leader and the one with the beacon stayed on the hill and the rest of us headed down to the cars to see if the missing person would turn up there. The bash back down took about an hour and a half. The missing tramper turned up about a half hour after we reached the cars all safe and sound and in good spirits and the others came out about another half hour later. On this trip I used the new app I had downloaded onto my smart phone, it recorded the route we took which I added into the Google Earth photo above and it was able to pick up satellites and show us where we were at any time. several in the party had these apps and they proved pretty reliable although some of the figures varied as to how much distance we travelled and height gained etc. Mine suggested we walked 8.78 Kms and climbed 1171 meters in 7 hours and 55 minutes.
