Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

I haven't made much in the way of inroads into my list of unvisited Victorian national parks on this trip (partly because those in the far northeast are still closed due to fire damage), but today's plan was to tick off one, The Lakes, in the form of the only part of it that's accessible by land - the end of the peninsula beyond Loch Sport. Loch Sport is one of those old-school coastal holiday towns whose population is 800 year-round and ten times that in the summer holidays (all holiday houses - I looked at staying here but the only accommodation was the caravan park), but whose services are definitely more consistent with the year-round population - in January the queue for coffee at the one place I found which sells it must stretch halfway to Sale. (I didn't see anyone younger than myself, although the 2016 Census stats tell me that 24% of the population is under 50 - they must have been hiding).

This was a pretty wild and woolly morning - Wilsons Prom had a wind gust of 158 km/h. It was more like half that here, but there was still plenty of surf up on the lakes and anything with an exposure to the west was to be avoided. I thus settled for a run through the middle of the peninsula to a bay on the other side, on sandy-but-not-too-soft tracks through coastal vegetation - a pretty nice place to run. Took a while to get into it but was starting to enjoy myself at times coming back, although hard work in the last bit which was into the wind, uphill or both.

Made my way home round the southern side of Gippsland, after a side excursion to Balook and the lovely Tarra Bulga forest. I haven't done this route in full before - have been down to the Prom quite a few times, while on the other side, went from Port Welshpool to Sale and on to Canberra in 1992 during the short-lived period that Port Welshpool was the Victorian end of the Seacat, generally known as the Spewcat (a name which Murray Scown, then five, embraced with great enthusiasm when I mentioned it) - it was actually a beautiful trip, past the Prom and various Bass Strait islands, if you weren't too nauseous to notice.

The bit in between was unexplored territory, although I know Toora by reputation as a pioneer in both the erection of wind turbines and the creation of dubious arguments against wind turbines - these days the action for both has moved a bit further east. (There's also a sign on the way out of Wonthaggi objecting to the desalination plant, but I'd suggest that ship has sailed). Steep green hills of grazing land close to the coast reminded me of the other side of the Tasman, and I was thinking someone else thought the same way when I saw a sign entering Foster for New Zealand Hill (although it appears to have got its name from a mine, presumably one run by a New Zealander).

C • Second mention of the Wonth... 1

At the best of times Corryong is a bit of an end-of-the-line place, and even more so this year as first the fires and then border closures cut off whatever through traffic it has. I found an end-of-the-line road in an end-of-the-line place, the road up the Thowgla Valley, which has two good features as a road to ride: a decent width and surface, and almost no traffic because it doesn't go anywhere (apart from some farms). I was struggling through the first half, particularly the first 15 minutes, but part of the reason why became apparent as soon as I turned around; in a broad valley you don't necessarily notice visually that you're climbing at a steady couple of percent. Did a bit extra into town (having negative-split by a substantial margin) to take it up to an hour.

Saturday morning is when people come to town, but quite a few places had apparently closed down, and I heard someone say that people were too scared to go out. (Total number of cases in Towong Shire for the pandemic to date: 0).

From there it was southwards, initially to Omeo, the last-but-one of the non-4WD-track crossings of the Victorian mountains for me to do (Jamieson-Licola is the one still outstanding), a long dirt road but nothing particularly challenging, and some nice scenery. I arrived in Omeo to road signs warning of a public event - a novelty in 2020 - which turned out to be a 100-mile MTB race. (Perhaps the signs could more usefully have been deployed at the spot on the Benambra road where two participants came out from a side road without paying any obvious attention to other traffic; I saw them and had plenty of room to go around them, but riding like that has the potential to endanger your health). Left town via the local observing site, which as it happened was an hour away from recording its highest November temperature. Saw plenty of burnt-out forest on both the northern and southern legs of this day; the lower-elevation forests mostly seem to be recovering OK, the higher-elevation ones less so, which may reflect how accustomed each is to fire.

The final leg to Sale saw a couple of diversions, to the former rainforest grove of Fairy Dell (near Bruthen), a casualty of last summer's fires, and the possibly-soon-to-be-former waterside hamlet of Hollands Landing, a strong candidate to be an early casualty of sea level rise. (Hollands Landing also has almost as many streets as it does houses, and I suspect may be one of the Gippsland coastal settlements where highly speculative subdivisions were sold to people whose investment was rendered effectively worthless when it transpired the land couldn't be built on).

C • Jamison-Licola Road 2

Still struggling to get much momentum in my training, and this time it was my quads which were feeling it, which was somewhat puzzling given that it's usually downhills that cause quads trouble and this run was essentially flat (although the wind was strong enough in places to create some fake hills).

Went back to old territory at Falls Creek, the Langfords Gap aqueduct (being reminded in the process that the gap is a wind tunnel). No-one else around, which I suspect would not be the case in January. It's a decade since I was last in these parts and the burnt area of snowgums are still a long way from full recovery, 17 years after the fire. (The taller forest lower down the mountain is making better progress).

The rest of the day involved a fair bit of new territory - down to the Omeo road, north to Mitta Mitta (with a side trip to Dartmouth Dam) and Tallangatta, then along the Murray to Corryong. There's not too much of this I've done before, apart from part of the Murray stretch and a short bit on the main Wodonga-Corryong road. Ducked briefly into NSW just because I could; in days of yore the reason why people might duck just over the border was to play the pokies (senior citizens headed for places like Moama and Corowa on buses in droves for this purpose), not that any such activity happened this far east, but the thing I was doing on the NSW side of the border which I couldn't legally do in Victoria was getting an ice-cream at the Jingellic general store without putting a mask on.

A big swathe of this area was burnt in last summer's fires. It was interestingly patchy; the big forested hills had been hammered, but on low ground there were a lot of unburnt trees (sometimes next to road signs with melted paint) and I didn't see any evidence of destroyed or newly rebuilt buildings near the road. I suspect what happened was that the fire moved across grassland areas with little fuel so quickly that the trees there didn't have time to catch fire, although radiant heat was still a problem for living creatures in the way (there were heavy stock losses). Something similar happened in Canberra 2003 - the grasslands between the Murrumbidgee and the west side of Stromlo looked lightly toasted rather than blackened.

Lake Hume was looking in the best shape I've seen it for a long time. Appropriately my music shuffle found this as the waters came into sight.

C • No-one else around 1

C • Corryong 13

Running continues to be a bit of a struggle in the fitness sense, especially up hills (even the gentle climbing which formed most of the first half of this run, on the bike path to Wandiligong), but at least the body was functioning. I had been concerned about soreness at the front of my right ankle but it was fine (better running than walking, actually) - and it was better driving today than it was yesterday, too.

I'm always partial to information boards so was somewhat gratified to see that the eucalypts (mostly) weren't cleared to make way for Bright's pine forests - the gold miners had done the clearing first.

Again today's excursion was in the afternoon after a morning work engagement, this time to Mount Buffalo, and getting to the Horn this time (the road there wasn't open on our 2011 visit and it would still have been under snow anyway). It's a nice area but there was an element of bittersweet about it, because parts of the plateau reminded me of parts of Namadgi that I'll probably never see looking like that again (unless (a) it doesn't burn again and (b) I live a sufficiently long and healthy life to still be exploring parks in my 80s). The south end of Buffalo itself took a hammering last summer, making the approach to the Horn a stark place indeed, but there are still plenty of untouched places, and on the way back I dropped into a waterfall which would once have been described as picture-postcard (these days the term is Instagrammable).

Original plan was a run today and a ride tomorrow, but was feeling both sleepy and sore this morning so decided to do a swap (hopefully tomorrow's part of the deal will work out). I had a (virtual) meeting this morning I couldn't get out of (there's another one tomorrow) so headed out after that - there's plenty around here for the ambitious, but my ambitions were lower and I contented myself with an explore up Buckland Valley, a climb sufficiently gentle that it felt easier going uphill with a modest tailwind than downwind with a modest headwind. A few calf twinges during the ride but didn't have the post-ride tightness I had on Monday (though the occasional post-driving front-of-ankle soreness is starting to put in an appearance).

An afternoon trip out to Hotham and Dinner Plain was a reminder of the mountains I ran up once upon a time (the Razorback was a particularly memorable one). The road up Hotham is not one I'd particularly want to be on in a blizzard.

C • Road up Hotham 6

Today was a reasonably long travel day from the first major stage of my trip to the second, from the Grampians across to Bright. The optimal route choice for this (at least according to Google) goes right past the front of Kooyoora so I could hardly pass up that opportunity. My back wasn't feeling great driving there, and it proved to be troublesome up hills too, but there was more than enough that wasn't to give me a taste for how much fun this area is - doing the phi loops area from the 2014 ultra-long, north of the campground. Shorter than I thought it was going to be, but with the back suspect I was happy with that. Wobbled a bit on one control, and picking my way from point to point a bit, but it's the most technical thing I've done since March so can't be too upset.

A bit of a theme for the rest of the day was "when was I last here" - there weren't too many bits of completely uncharted territory apart from the Halls Gap-Stawell-St. Arnaud route, but there were plenty of places I haven't been in a decade or two, including St. Arnaud itself (2009), the northeast exit from Bendigo (2008, and I'm not falling over myself to do it again in the next 12 years) and the route across from there to Violet Town (2003). For that matter, I think it's 2005 since I last set foot in Bright itself, and 2011 since I was last in the Victorian mountains at all. One thing which is definitely new since last year, though, is the big solar farm next to the Hume at Winton.

You learn something new every day: there is a conspiracy theory in Germany (or perhaps more accurately a satire of a conspiracy theory) which holds that the city of Bielefeld does not exist. This will come as news to most who were at WOC 1995.

C • Bright 10

Monday would normally be a swim session, but I couldn't work out how to make a booking for Warrnambool's pool without already being a member (I get the sense that this is one regional setting where people from Melbourne will be persona non grata for a while yet), so instead I stopped for a ride on my way to the Grampians. (Hawkesdale, my start point, has a pool of its own - and they seem quite proud of it because its 1969 opening features on the town's history timeline - but it only opens weekends).

This was a reasonably flat ride with only a few small hills, mostly early and late. Quite windy, more crosswind than anything else but tending towards favourable in the second half. Didn't feel as if I had much energy early on, but built into it and the last 30 minutes were a nice cruise through Western District farming country on a quiet road.

My main sightseeing plan for the day was to climb Mount Abrupt, but it was in cloud so I did Mount Sturgeon instead (the last peak at the southern end of the range, overlooking Dunkeld). Impressive views to be had from there, and more impressive ones from various lookouts closer to Halls Gap later in the day (the cloud had mostly lifted by mid-afternoon).

Calves were pretty tight at times post-ride, so maybe that's the trigger for them? Hopefully they'll settle overnight as I don't think I'd have fancied trying to run on them this afternoon, although walking was OK.