Mt. Ovens Trip – Saturday 24th June. Trip Leader Training Day
Attending and vehicles:
Neil Flower (Trip leader) and passenger Matt Smith (Navigator) – LR. Disco 2
Phillip and Linda Favaloro – Asst. trip leader – Nissan Patrol.
Shane and Kylie Beatson with children Olivia, Joel and Isabel – Mitsubishi Pajero.
Hugh and Dagmar Rees – LR Defender.
Greg Paterson – Mitsubishi Pajero.
Eric, Diane and Laura Liney – Holden Rodeo.
We met at Gt Western Hwy at Lithgow. (No, not ‘Macca’s’ – across the road and down wind a little!).
The first stop was at the Caltex servo. At Williamsons Springs (Yetholme) where we regrouped, we met up with the Liney family from Mudgee, prayed and made our official start.
Next stop was our morning Tea break at Mt. Ovens South, which not only gives great views over the Macquarie Valley and the city of Bathurst, but is also the highest point in that part of the Gt. Dividing Range (I,276 metres). You could see for miles (kilometers for the young) and there was great interest in picking out landmarks like the Mt. Panorama motor racing circuit. From there we followed the tracks that we had surveyed on the ‘Recce’ a couple of weeks earlier, but this time we were ready with Neil’s and Phillip’s motorized scrub clippers and a couple of pairs of secateurs. Result? No more ‘pin striping’ that day! A few stops were made throughout the morning run to give some practical tips for future trip leaders as well as some training in how to assess trip gradients for both downhill as well as uphill runs so as to be able to give some confidence to new members.
It was a good day, not too cold (not as cold as we thought that it would be), fine and relatively cloud free. We explored a couple of new tracks that hadn’t been done on the ‘Recce’ and noted on the maps some other new tracks into the Eucalyptus forest that will be worth ‘having a trip on’ in some future visit to the area.