Wungong Gorge Hike

The first hike of 2017 and it took over 4 hours. In a first, we didn’t go to a designated hiking trail and tried to make this one our own. We took inspiration from one of Life of Py‘s hikes, but then bastardised it and made it our own, but it was great to have a starting point to work from.

Without realising it, once we arrived at the Wungong Dam car park it all felt a little bit familiar, having been here once before on one of my many dam photo trips.

The dam itself provided some pretty spectacular views and as a major landmark helped us get our bearings. In fact the only real guidance we had was the intention to travel west on the southern ridge for about 4 km, travel north down the steep slope and through the gorge onto the other side, then travelling east, mirroring the start and looping round back to the dam. I managed to download some maps onto the tablet which had a few more trails marked than google maps does, so that helped too (it’s an android app called ‘ViewRanger‘). Only later did I realise it was actually a set of Mountain Bike trails that I’d downloaded, which can vary in quality and bush coverage.

We ventured West in our fastest kilometre of the entire hike. The first part was a bit windy and contained some tarmac and 4×4 roads, but once we reached the signs for Wungong Reagional Park, the paths became narrower and we became more exposed to gigantic and flying spider webs.

By the time we reached the western edge of the walk, the path opened up giving us a great view of new housing estates and the town of Byford, the usual views of the city of Perth in the distance. It also provided us a view of the paths we were going to have to walk  up on the other side of the valley, and it looked pretty intimidating!

We walked our first downhill walk into the alley. Steep but littered with big rocks, I think we both enjoyed walking down here. I remember saying that I was glad it wasn’t one of those annoying gravel descents. It didn’t take us long at all to make our way down into the valley. Stopped a couple times to enjoy the views especially as we came closer to the base. Because its a valley headed by a dam, we knew a stream or river would be the sign we’d reached half way.

We stopped for a quick bite to eat and then started to tackle that non-stop uphill struggle. A metaphor for life no doubt! It was worse than the Echydna trail, but I think I did alright. All that cardio training has been paying off! Some of the effort of course was wasted overtaking each other to get some decent action shots. The lesson I learned is – don’t run up the hill. It will break you. All in all, I think we climbed almost 300 metres on that hill alone!

At the end of the climb we headed west, saw an echidna – they don’t do much. We started getting abused by the Horse Flies. I thought Magpies were bad, but it seems horse flies are much shittier, very persistent and want to suck your blood! The path soon disappeared. We kind of expected this but we still managed to double back and complete some drastic direction changes. Thanks to the tablet we didn’t go too far off trail. If you look at the screen capture at the top of the route walked you’ll see where we double backed, usually in the corners of the route.

After some 3 hours of walking we arrived at the eastern ridge edge and started our descent back towards the dam. Remember how earlier I was so thankful that the hill wasn’t one of those annoying gravel descents? This was one of those annoying gravel descents. Complete with slow progress, slippery ground and horse flies. Nothing like ramping up the difficulty level when you're tired. I did record a short video of Rebecca shuffling down the hill, but it was terribly boring, with the lack of progress, and her shouting at me…

The whole walk took us just over 4 hours, walking a distance of 13.49km. Stats are at the top. Strangely Rebecca’s Fit Bit claims we walked 18km…so who knows. All I know is the hardest parts were the hills! Still, now we have a route, may have to do it again…in reverse.