We took off from the town of Bunbury (where we were staying with my cousin and her husband) at 6AM via train to Perth (the biggest city in West Australia) and hopped on a bus out to a suburb about an hour away called Kalamunda (fun, right?). All relatively painless! That put us at the info center at about 9:30 AM, not bad for a first day! We checked in there and quickly hit the trail.
Day one was challenging for the following reasons: our packs were very heavy, heavier than I can ever remember as we'd crammed seven days of food in those bad boys (202 km until resupply). The next reason is that we had to get accustomed to the terrain which is a lot of "pea gravel" - the underlying granites (old granites too) have slowly weathered into these rounded little red pebbles that like to make walking a little tricky (at least at first). I (Jamie) had a slip in our first 10 minutes (how embarrassing!).
We did take it pretty easy though, and in that section the huts are fairly close together which means water isn't a big problem. The water situation thus far has been this: there is no water in any stream, lake, pond, or billabong. The only water source we've seen is the water catchment site that is dammed up (this is sent via the longest water pipeline in the world to the gold fields of Kalgoorlie where the gold is literally spilling out of the topsoil, apparently). Luckily there are rain water drums at all the shelters (shelters are just like the Appalachian Trail, by the way) and these have been no issue whatsoever! We just put a couple of drops of bleach in there and we're good to go. We've taken to "cameling up" as much as possible and only carrying a liter between water sources to reduce weight.
And the shelter sites are just gorgeous - the sparse landscape in general makes the whole place look like it has been professionally landscaped. The plants in many places seem to just give each other space so they look intentional. And it is all desert vegetation, meaning EVERYTHING HAS SPIKES, which has been problematic in a few areas where the trail was a bit overgrown. But at the shelters it looks even more manicured, as it seems to be part of hut culture to rake the pea gravel when you are done - sometimes it legit looks like a zen garden. And it is a pretty lonely kind of track, especially compared to the AT, so we've only shared shelters two of the 6 nights out. In fact I counted a 68 hour span of time where we didn't encounter a single other person - I can't remember this happening ever before in my life. Apparently this has to do with the time of year - we are early in the hiking season as it is still fairly warm out - more will be coming behind us it sounds like, and most people hike in spring when it is cooler still and there are zillions of wildflowers.
For wildlife we've seen lots of tiny wallabies and larger kangaroos - they are sort of everywhere and I don't think I'll get sick of them because they are so damn cute. Lots of lizards, including a couple of really big guys. There are lots of things that can kill us out here as well! Notably spiders and snakes (hence I got that GPS unit which has an SOS function which would summon search and rescue if need be), but apparently its the sort of "they are more scared of you then you are of them", which would mean that they are pretty damned scared of me! We passed a dead scorpion on the trail as well to which Shannon said, "They have scorpions TOO?! This changes everything!". We had to add them to the deadly thing list. Ticks were a problem for a few days (we've been told we are finished with them now though) - these guys are tiny - they are called pepper ticks and luckily aren't Lyme's carriers because I counted 200 of them on my socks and shoes (took an hour to get them all off). We saw a little possum yesterday as well (different from our opossums, they are really cute), and zillions of crazy birds (cockatoos, parrots, kookaburras, ravens, REALLY BIG EAGLES, and magpies). So yeah, animals have been a definite highlight. And for flora, there are a whole lot of eucalyptus species that form the vast majority of the over-story - these are really neat trees because 1.) they have the same sort of camo-bark thing going on as sycamores, 2.) they smell awesome, and 3.) they are super fire resistant so they are all sort of burned at the bottoms but still flourishing. They do a lot of prescribed burns here and most of the plants' seeds are fire activated so they won't take until there has been a fire. Neat! The black of the charcoal provides a neat juxtaposition between the red soils and greens of the plants.
The terrain has been interesting because of the desert conditions and the flora/fauna, not necessarily because of the topography. There have been a few challenging little climbs, but nothing approaching a typical day on the AT and sometimes some pretty boring flat stretches that follow old gravel roads. Luckily we are finding the gravel isn't too rough on the feet, but Shannon is starting to feel the wear and tear of averaging 18 miles a day for our first week out (with a lot of weight). Our speed has been a lot slower than we can remember traveling on the AT as well - this should be expected of course as we are not trail fit yet, but it is difficult to come to terms with. The daylight is quickly getting less and less so we are pulling into camps near dark (we are going to try and get up earlier so we can take off at daylight but we have a hard time waking up in the dark!).
The night before last we actually stayed at an old lookout tower facility, an enclosed cabin next to the firetower on Mt. Wells. Pretty neat place! I always find actual cabins a novelty as they have such a different feel from the open wall structures. We woke up at 4:45AM, which wasn't much of a feat considering we'd fallen asleep probably by 8:30PM, to get ready in the darkness. We made our usual breakfast of tea/coffee and oatmeal (we've been throwing chopped up dates in there, its better than brown sugar!) and packed up just in time for sunrise. We made our way to the first hut 15k away by about 10:15 and had ourselves a snack - we were pushing for town, so we kept it pretty brief. We kept on and stopped around noon, just by the railroad track end that we would follow later on into town, and had ourselves some lunch (our go-to crackers and tuna crumbled together and mixed with mayo - DELISH). Shannon was having a bit of a rough time at that point; maybe exhaustion, we're not sure, so we had to take it easy for an hour or so until she came back to. We followed this old disused railway for a bit and then it turned into a still-in-use railway (a tourist train on the weekends). The trail skirts back and forth across it and was a bit overgrown in places so we decided to follow the advice of another hiker we met earlier that day and just follow the track directly and keep our ears open for the odd chance that it actually came our way! This was to be our longest day yet at 21 miles, so we were pretty excited to hit town!
We got our lay of the land at this really nice visitor center (where we are sitting at now!) and found a cute little "bushwalker cabin" at the caravan park in town for a very fair fee of $40 AUD (we'd of course picked up a six pack of Victoria Bitter on the way over!). We did some much needed laundry, took some super hot super long showers, and made our way to the local pub for more brews and 3 dinners between the two of us. Heaven. We then had another big meal at a cute café in town this morning and we're just taking care of some internet things now before we head over to the grocery store to get provisions for the next 4.5 day section. I guess from here we will get more into mixed hardwood ecosystems before hitting coastline environments further south.
We will try and update again from our next resupply spot in Collie!
We will have pictures later on, we can't upload from here.
If you want to follow our GPS position, follow this link!
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