The Cathedral Ranges

 The Range from North to South (Day1)

There are many short walks and circuit walks outlined on the Walking Track Guide but one they left off, was off course to walk the entire length of the range, which is exactly what I did with a couple of friends at the start of December (1996). Since neither of them hopefully have a means of retribution on the internet let me introduce them:

Doug "I feel the cold" Daws

Mark "Are you sure this is the right track?" Aufflunk

Since I had the only camera there are no pictures of me on this trip (excellent planning never goes astray).

With two cars between us, we parked one at Sugarloaf Saddle carpark at the end of the walk and then drove back to Ned's Gully to start the walk. With a light pack it is possible to do the walk in a day but we decided to do it over two, with an overnight stop at the Farmyard. After a short, steep walk our packs decided that they needed a rest so we set them down to detour out along 20 Fathom Ridge for our first view. The Ned's Gully track is the easiest track up to the ridge, but even it has moments when the gradient gets a "little annoying".

At Ned's Saddle there are a number of options, and since we had a lot of time we headed north to the Little Cathedral so that we could really walk the full length of the range. We had lunch at the saddle between the "Cathedrals" and then walked the short track up to the Little Cathedral. Mark ruined this shot by not obliging and standing right out at the edge.

In hind sight the walk to the Little Cathedral was possibly not a good move psychologically, as we turned around only to see the long steep walk that lay ahead on the way to Cathedral North. As it turned out, though, the walk to the top seemed much shorter than we expected although it was certainly steep enough. The trig station is on Cathedral North and offers a clearer view than from The Cathedral.

From there it was on to The Cathedral and down along the ridge towards our campsite. Our map had a note for this section that it was narrow and rocky. It was right, it was narrow and rocky, with a steep drop on one side and a cliff (and great views) on the other. Eventually we came to the spot that I was waiting for, the view along the ridge all the way to Sugarloaf and beyond. Our whole walk was their in front of us, all the way to the knife edge of rock (the Buttresses and the Razorback) sticking up along the ridge to the Sugarloaf, which seemed a lot steeper than any other Sugarloaf I had seen.

As we proceeded along the ridge there seemed to be one question that kept on coming up... "Are you sure this is the track?"... together with a few snide remarks about a certain walk up Mt Difficult. Just as the warnings say, the track is not always clear in the more barren and rocky areas and we kept a lookout for the little orange (supposedly red according to the guide) arrows nailed to the trees marking the track. These orange arrows are also useful for walking at night as they are reflective and show up quite clearly by torchlight.

We eventually reached the Farmyard with enough daylight left to collapse for a while before walking down along Jawbone Creek to find water and then set up camp and cook dinner. All in all a very civilised pace for a day's walking, with the rigours of negotiating the terrain making up for the short distance we had covered. As this was the first walk that either of us had done for a while there was bound to be a few things that either got left behind or that weren't quite "right". Mark's powdered milk refused to dissolve, I forgot to add the coconut cream to my rice before it had absorbed all of the water and I left the jar of plums in port on the kitchen table. Having opened the can of coconut cream I felt obliged to consume it and tried spreading some on a chocolate based, choc chip biscuit. Bingo, a new desert/ breakfast recipe is born. (A later modification of this recipe was trialled at Wilsons Prom, to the approval of the wrens.) With open fires prohibited on the range some of our cooking plans had to be modified but we managed to get by with a trangia and a shellite stove.

As the sun went down the birds took it in turns to call out to each other, and as if they had a point to prove, the lyre birds let loose with their repertoire of every bird call of every bird in the area and a few noises that sounded more like car alarms than anything else.