2004/02 New South Wales loop - Gibraltar and Washpool |
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From Glen Innes we headed east along the lonely Gwydir Highway. This passes through no towns but brought us to Gibraltar and Washpool national parks, one on each side of the road.
After a quick stop at the Boundary Creek waterfall, we decided to camp at the Bellbird 
campsite in Washpool, and found ourselves camping next to our neighbours from the Allyn River. They’d gone by a different route but had been just as wet as us!
We went out that evening to look for possums in the trees, but found none until we got back to the camper and found one of them trying to squeeze through our partly open door. Possums obviously use their time more productively than humans do.
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Washpool (10.35) |  |
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Thursday February 26th
This theme continued the next morning, with a brush turkey up on the picnic 
table, sorting through last night’s crumbs, and a currawong joining us for breakfast. It was a sunny day and it looked like the best hikes were over in the other park, so we moved across the road into Gibraltar national park, and found a campsite there.
There were rufous wallabies wandering around the campground, and birds all over. We hiked up an old forestry road to an overlook of the Needles roc
k spires. On the way we met a snake (unidentified), a large black lizard, and some amazing fungi.
After all that we felt ambitious enough to climb the trail to the Blue Gum forest, massive blue-grey trees towering over an under-forest of tree ferns. Nobody else seemed to be out on the trails, and we had the forest to ourselves.
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Friday February 27th
I went for an early morning walk along the river, looking for platypus, but the trail only briefly got close to the river.
Mostly I just saw flowers, but I did come nose to nose with a dingo. I saw him before he saw me, time to see the expression of disgust on his face. 
“What is this human doing on my trail?” He watched me 
for a couple of seconds and then just turned around and stalked back down the trail.
Back at the campsite, I spent a lot of time sorting out a poor electrical connection in the camper while a couple of currawongs sorted through all the stuff we had drying out on the picnic table. When we shooed them away from there they circled back and took our breakfast toast. By this time we were the only people in the park, so I 
guess we were the target for all the hungry wildlife!
Sandie went off to use the showers, found that they didn’t have a hot tap, and decided to stay dirty.