New Day Rising – Day 10

Barmouth Creek to East Branch Nicholson River

Gunaikurnai Country

4 March 2025

It’s just a black or red line crossing a green background on a thick sheet of paper.  It’s 2D. A paper map. It represents reality, but is not necessarily accurate or true. You can make up wild ideas of what the reality is that the print represents. 

How many evenings have I sat under the soft glow of the lamp contemplating possible routes and what they might look like in person? I look at those black/red lines, seeking out the wiggly ones and trying to figure out how to connect them up to make a route. Then, in my head, I think about what the views might be like, what the track will be like, what the little purple triangle tents that represent informal camping sites might be like. 

Then I go to the VIC gov “More to explore” app and look at the topo lines for the tracks I’ve plotted on the paper map. I am very familiar with that app now and have a feel for its contour intervals. I know how tightly stacked those topo lines can appear and the track still be rideable. I know what the lines look like when I’ll have to get off and push. I know what the lines look like when it is so steep that I’ll be heaving and ho-ing to get the bike up the hill. 

There is always the anticipation leading into a ride of how the landscape will roll out before you on the road. 

Today, my mental map formulated from all the nights looking at the map, and from riding in this general area in 2023, will be grossly inaccurate. My idea of what ‘could be’ is not at all what it turns out to be.

But first we’ve got to get ourselves across the river. It’s not deep and the current is not intimidating. The problem with this crossing is that the river bottom is full of big, rounded rocks that are covered in slippery goo and detritus (yes, there’s a higher nutrient load than the creek where we camped last night). And the opposite side of the river has two big sandbanks to get the bike and gear up.

I contemplate just pushing the bike and gear across in one go. The bike will help me balance. But I’m afraid I could get the loaded bike stuck in one of the sandbanks and then drop the bike into the sand. Not ideal. 

So I take the rear panniers off, carry them over, then go back for the bike. I teeter and totter back and forth, carefully placing each footstep and letting it slide into a solid position before taking the next step. Once I get the bike across, I push it up the hill to a flat spot, since it’s steep enough on exit that I wouldn’t be able to get going if I loaded up and tried to ride away from the bottom.

Once the panniers are back on and I’ve got most of the sand off my feet, and my feet wedged back in my shoes, we take off across the floodplain in a wide spot in the valley.

We meet the Nicholson Track junction and there is a small, somewhat fresh, campfire ring on the edge of the road. Not an ideal campspot, so it makes me glad that I camped where I did because it means there was nothing better close by. 

And then, all those mental images in my mind of how the map might play out in person… are dashed. The track heads uphill and is very overgrown. If you were in a 4WD, you’d pinstripe your vehicle pretty continuously for the next 15 kms. 

In my mind, the track would not be overgrown, as this was burnt as a backburn in the Barmouth Spur fire in 2019 and wouldn’t have burnt as hot. But I guess that triple dip La Nina provided excellent growing conditions for the regrowth the past few years. 

In my mind, the track undulates above the river, darting in and out of incoming tributaries, but keeping a mostly gentle gradient the whole way. I guess I was imagining the Omeo Hwy in the Big River valley, just as a 4WD track and tighter and narrower instead. 

The topo lines on the paper map support this idea. The More to Explore app topo lines seem to mostly support this, suggesting only a few places where I’ll need to get off and push when this river track meets up with a track coming down a spur. 

But a whole lot can happen between topo lines. That is our lesson for today.

I start in on that overgrown track. Too bad that bulldozer hasn’t made it over here!  

An old song by Sinead O’Connor pops into my head – Just Like You Said It Would Be – as I battle forth, only in my head I’m singing, “Just like I thought it would be”. 

So not only is the track really overgrown, it’s all bushy stuff, so there are really no views of the river, no perspective, no way to see the big picture. We’re just bogged down in the hairy depth of detail. 

The track surface leaves a lot to be desired, too. It is really rocky and quite eroded in many places. And it does not gently undulate. We’ll end up gaining about 250 metres of elevation in 8 kms, even though we only go from about 250m to 300m above sea level.

It is incredibly slow going with so many short steep pinches on big, loose babyhead rock or down deeply rutted drops to dry creek crossings. 

My back doesn’t like it. My shoulder doesn’t like it. It is much more heaving than I imagined. Sometimes the bike computer doesn’t even register a speed as we shove the bike UP, sometimes balancing on the centre mound between tyre ruts while pushing the bike up another mound, and other times slipping and sliding on slippery rock while trying to keep the weight on the ball of my foot so I don’t slide out. 

As we go, another angry Sinead O’Connor song comes into my head. Troy. It’s off one of her early albums, The Lion and the Cobra. That’s a good album, it’s got plenty of ‘the roar’.  I like that one album, but never really followed her after that. 

But today I’m yelling out, “I didn’t mean to hurt you! I swear! I didn’t mean those things I said!… Like a phoenix to the flame, I will rise! And I will return!… You shoulda left the light on, YOU shoulda left the light on… But you’re still a liar. You’re still a liar!”

Yeah, ‘the roar’ is helping me battle the steep, loose uphills, the steep, loose downhills, the dry creek crossings and the deeply eroded bits where the tyre ruts can be knee-to-thigh deep. 

ARRRRGH. Here we go. 

All at walking speed, sometimes less. 

I can’t even bomb the steep downhills, there is just too much loose rock leading into super tight turns across dry creek beds, or deeply eroded ruts, to get up any appreciable speed.

Roar, roar, roar. Get up those fucking steep grades! I’m wrong-sided pushing the bike at times, I’m slipping and sliding almost all the time. And every hair on my head is completely soaked with sweat. 

We work very, very hard for every kilometre. 

Yes, we’re about 4.5 hours into the day and we’ve only done 7 kilometres. This is officially the slowest, toughest track I’ve ever done. And I’m doing it with an ouchy back and a stiff, frozen shoulder that does not want to reach very far. Roar. Roar. Roar. 

And then, in quick succession, I manage a trifecta of potentially terrible. First, my greatest fear for this track comes true: a tree fallen across the track. But thankfully, it’s a tiny one and easy to get the bike up and over.

Then, I’m trudging up a low-thigh height tyre rut with the bike up above me on one of the humps. The distance between humps is too big for me to be on one and the bike on the other. I can’t reach. So I’m down in the rut pushing the bike up top. All is fine, until I slip on the loose rock, fall and pull the bike down on top of me. Luckily, the bike handlebar lands on the centre mound and I just fall onto the centre hump as well.

But, I totally wrench my frozen shoulder in the process. Holy mother of ******! But, that curse word-worthy, angry, sharp, throbbing  pain only lasts for about 15 seconds and then just recedes to a sharp ache. Yay! That is progress. Last spring, like when I came across the snake near Tumbarumba, that awful pain would last for 10 minutes and would stay pretty intense for another 20-30. I’m down to under a minute!

I extricate myself from the bike and stand up in the rut. I grab the handlebar and the bike seat, and in one big push and stepping motion, push the bike up as I climb onto the same mound as the bike. I then just teeter the bike on the edge of the mound  and scrape myself along the bushes until we get to the top. 

Then, not long after this we get a blessedly flat bit of a run for a hundred metres. Partway along this is a huge boghole that covers the entire track. I have no idea of the depth, so I tiptoe along the edge, scraping myself through a bush as I push the bike along the edge of the puddle. It is deep. It almost reaches the brake pads. 

But then, my right foot slips into the puddle off the little lip I’m teetering across. I pull my foot back out quickly, thankfully just wet and not soaked through. 

Holy moly – what else can you throw at me, Nicholson Track!?

I finally get to one of the little purple triangles on the map. The previous ones have all been steep-dropping tracks that disappeared into bushes. This one also disappears into bushes, but it doesn’t seem too steep after the very first bit. 

So I lay the bike down at the top of the track, grab my water filtering gear and some lunch, and head down the track. (I’m not worried about the bike. I haven’t seen or heard anyone in 36 hours.)

I get down to the little clearing. Ohhhh, this is good. It sits in a little copse of second and third growth manna gums that have somehow escaped logging. It’s nice. I walk down the little path to the river.  Even nicer.

The site sits on a big bend where the river takes a turn to the south. There’s a large, cobbled beach on the inside of the bend with a thick sandbank along the water’s edge. Another small creek (turns out it is the East Branch of the river, but is significantly smaller) joins on the outside of the bend. Perfect for gathering water with less nutrient load than the main river. There is a big log in the shade below a tree fern. Idyllic. 

I immediately decide we are finished for the day here. I have only covered 8 kilometres. But I don’t care. This is a great little spot and I want to soak it in. It deserves way more than just being  a lunch spot. 

So I head back up the hill, grab my bike and then get the tent set out to dry. I go down to the river, cross over to the smaller branch, filter 5 litres, then sit on the cobbled rocks and have lunch. THIS is what touring is all about – the unexpected good finds that make up for a mental expectation that did not play out in reality. A beautiful spot after a super hard effort.

It makes me think of the Husker Du song, “These Important Years”: ‘…If you don’t stop to smell the roses now, they might end up on you. Expectations only mean you think you know what’s coming next, and you don’t…. These are your important years, you better make them last.’

I fall in love quickly. I feel like I could stay in this little spot forever, or at least until a 4WD guy came along and shattered the silence and peace. 

Ahhhhhhhhhh………….

The guys float the afternoon away. I decompress my spine and my head. I let the silence envelope me and breathe all that introvert energy back into me. I recharge, plugged into the gurgle of the water, the whisper of the breeze through the leaves, the autumn sun angle that glows instead of glowers, the soft, sand under my bum and back. My battery fills. 

What a day. Hardest effort for that distance ever. And you’d never ever know it looking at the topo lines. A whole lot can happen in between those 20 metre interval lines!

And you ask, well, why don’t you get a GPS and it’d tell you every single turn, every single climb and its grade? You’d know what was coming.

Because that, my friend, misses the entire point. That’s like asking why I don’t just get a 4WD. 

Because it’s the not knowing that I enjoy. It’s letting the day unfold without every metre allocated. It’s letting the track roll up and over and out and down before me, the map becoming reality and my mental map drawing up a more accurate and true reality. At least for now, until my memory fades. 

If you look too closely at those topo lines ahead of time, or you plot out a Garmin route ahead of time… it’s easy to talk yourself out of something. It’s easy to say, “that’s too hard.” And where is the adventure in that? 

Today was very, very hard. It was a lot of effort for very little elevation or distance gain. But I like the hard. I like the challenge. I like to continually up the ante. I like to be out there without any people around, just working my way through the bush, taking it all in. However it comes. 

It is the need to not be comfortable, to not need anyone around to go and explore the bush. It is being comfortable being uncomfortable. It is the drive to push hard and push beyond what I thought I could do. It is ‘the roar’.