Interim – Aggro spring animals

Hume and Hovell Track – Burra Creek, Tumbarumba – 26 September 2024

Wiradjuri Country

It’s the silence that compels me. It’s the time alone in the quiet, where the only sound is the crunch of my bike tyres on the gravel and the repeating click of the freewheel on a downhill, that I enjoy more than anything else.  

Some people enjoy bike touring for their interactions with people and the conversations they have with strangers along the way. But that is not for me. My favourite days are when I don’t have to speak to anyone at all. My utmost favourite days are when I do not see a human at all. In a world where there is constant noise, I seek out the silence and recharge in the lack of sound. 

But today there is no quiet. And there is no bike. I’m on foot for a while yet until the major tears of my rotator cuff tendons heal. There are no humans present, but nature is being noisy today. 

I’m heading down a small, squishy path next to a creek ‘running a banker’. It’s obviously been out of its banks over the past couple days, because I step on newly formed sand banks on the flood plain and every step is muddy, squelchy and squishy. 

Progress is slow as we sink in a bit with every step and choose steps carefully to stay out of the standing water. I wasn’t quite expecting this. Back home in Albury, we received about 22 mms over 36 hours two days ago. They’ve obviously had a lot more up here near Tumbarumba. (67mm in Tumba and 82mm in the creek catchments – I look it up after I get home).

We’re day-hiking a section of the Hume and Hovell Track just outside of Tumbarumba. This long-distance walk runs from Yass to Albury and was developed as part of a Bicentenary project in 1988. It roughly follows the route of two explorers who were the first men to blaze a white people trail from Sydney to Melbourne in 1824. 

The trackheads are very nice, but the trail doesn’t tend to get a lot of maintenance or use. A lot of it goes through pine plantations or follows 4WD tracks or roads. Some portions go through private land and open paddocks. Most of the most scenic, singletrack portions were burnt out in the 2019/20 fires. 

So, even when we lived very near the track back in 2003/04, I’ve never really had a desire to through-hike it. But there are a few sections that I’d like to do as day hikes. With time up my sleeve before my next work contract starts, and VIC school holidays meaning I have no desire to go down there this week, I’ve decided to head up here and do a couple sections of trail. 

The leaves on the exotic trees are just barely starting to leaf out. It gives the tree limbs a studded look of light yellow-green. The grasses are a brilliant fluorescent green from all of the rain, and the sun definitely has a mid-spring angle. It is a very pleasant day to be out for a hike, regardless of how squishy.

There is nothing natural about this creek. It was heavily mined for gold and tin from the 1870s to 1930s.

But the series of cascades are similar to what Hume and Hovell would have seen, and it’s a really nice walk today with all of that white noise of water rushing downhill. 

I only get attacked by one magpie who does a couple of very close fly-bys and a couple more half-hearted ones. He draws no blood, so it’s all good with me.

Shortly after we pass the signed ‘falls’ described in Hume and Hovell’s journals, we climb over a fence and start into a section where there is a steep and rocky slope on one side and a drop off to the creek directly below. 

And then we see a nearly one-metre long eastern brown snake. I stop. I give it plenty of room. Eastern browns are very, very common where I live. They also happen to be the second most venomous snake in the world. If you get bitten, you’ve got about 30 minutes left to live if you do not get anti-venom. You will generally not feel too terribly unwell, until the last couple minutes before you die of cardiac arrest. 

So, you know, I’m a bit cautious around these reptiles. I stand there for awhile – maybe 5-7 minutes, waiting to see if it will slither off the path and I can proceed. With the steep hillside and the drop to the creek, there is no way to walk around it. 

But that snake is going nowhere. It is very much enjoying its sunbaking session there on the path. 

So I decide that maybe I can backtrack about 5-7 metres and climb the hillside where it’s not quite so vertical. Then I’ll just go along the top of the hill and drop back down to the trail a little bit beyond the snake. Sounds like a plan.

It’s a good plan for the first two to three steps before there is suddenly a very quick movement just in front of me. I have almost stepped on the tail of an even BIGGER brown snake. It slithers forward quickly and then turns back on itself and raises its head. Shit!!!! It’s at least 1.5 metres long and quite thick. I was looking closely for more snakes, but didn’t even see it. 

I let out that gutteral ‘aaah-yaaah’ sound that you make when you are surprised, and I quickly backtrack down the steep slope. Eastern browns aren’t as aggressive as tiger snakes, but they can be more aggressive at this time of year. So it is best to not mess around with them at any time, but even more so in spring. 

As I hastily retreat, I catch a foot in the rocks and blackberry brambles and trip forward. I fall sorta to my knees, and for a brief moment, I’m afraid my momentum is going to carry me on into the creek! 

But I do manage to stop. However, in the process of falling, my bad arm has been flung out in a direction it really, really does not like. The pain is excruciating for about 1 minute and then recedes to a very, very ouchy throbbing for the next 30 minutes. 

Okay. We’re done. The plan today was to hike down the creek a bit further and then take a side route up Big Hill where there are good views to the Australian Alps. This was Hume and Hovell’s first view of them – before they backtracked up the creek a bit and took a less hilly route south. My plan was to have lunch up at Big Hill, then hike down to the confluence of Burra Creek and Tumbarumba Creek, before retracing my steps back to the car.

But, nope, two snakes in 10 metres, no way to get around, and a very painful shoulder… we’re done. We thought we would hike about 16kms today, but we’ll end up with about 8.  Never mind. Safety first. We’ll have lunch back at the trackhead campground (we’ve camped there before on a bike tour in 2016). 

We see no more snakes. We don’t even have to negotiate through any sheep or cows, though there is a very vocal one in a paddock above the creek that doesn’t really approve of my presence. Wouldn’t that be fun to also be charged by a bull?!

We stay in one of the motels for the night – it’s okay, but the walls are so thin you can hear people rolling over in bed next door… and every other single noise anyone makes. A bunch of workers leave between 3.30 and 5am, so it’s not the best night’s sleep. 

The next morning we head off to do a section of trail near Munderoo. It takes me awhile driving around in the pine plantation to find the section of track I want to do. I park the car off the side of the road, but try to keep a couple tyres on firmer ground so I don’t get stuck in the soft soil. Rear wheel drive helps, and a 2003 Ford sedan is pretty sturdy and reliable, but I don’t want to test out yet another form of insurance (i.e. roadside assistance) so soon after my travel insurance claim! I don’t have any phone coverage up here anyway.

The track has one section through some remnant forest, but most is along and through pine plantations. I hike out to the gap, but the views back toward the Alps aren’t really better than from the road down below on the plateau (which I’ve ridden two or three times before). 

So it’s a disappointing and long walk of 20 kms. But you never know until you go. Sorry, there are no pics. I forgot to take my phone charger with me and am saving the last bits of charge in case I need to use the phone for an emergency. There really wasn’t much to take pics of anyway.  See pics from a previous ride here: https://rambleoutyonder.org/2018/01/18/4000-for-40-may-ride-2-day-1/

I have no idea when my work contract will start – part of the money from the grant funds my role. Some groups in Round 1 last year did not receive funds until November. We got word we were successful with the grant application, as I was sitting at Sydney airport waiting on my flight to Albury on 28 August. It was a nice welcome home present. 

I am very proud of that achievement. I wrote that grant entirely myself, and got it through all three preliminary hoops, after consulting with all of my councils on what projects they wanted to do. The grant funding is worth around $700,000.  The largest grant I’ve ever pulled down previously was only worth $350,000.

 I started out in Oz with absolutely no job/work contacts – not even Nigel or his family and friends helped me find any work. So to go from working in a tiny industrial lighting component factory in 2001, to a supermarket, to being invited to do a PhD, to working for government for the past eight years, to finally earning an income above median wage and then writing a big-arse grant pulling from federal funds… I’m proud of myself. 

Once the one-year contract finishes, I’m ready for that to be my highest corporate achievement before I give it all away to go do menial work for six months each year to fund riding in the mountains for the other six months of the year going foward. My identity has never been tied to my work!

While I wait for the funding to land, I’ve got my eye on a few other hikes down in Victoria for the next time we get a string of sunny days. My arm is not likely to be ready for cycling for another couple weeks, and then it is likely to take some time to build up to longer rides.

In the meantime, the guys are very happy to go for drives and floats between other adventures. They particularly like going up to the local dam.  At least the snakes are much easier to see there in the open.