Heysen Trail Part 1 _ Spalding to Hallett

^{_{Setting off}}

Monday 30 Aug 2021, I set off from the Spalding footbridge. My ultimate destination is Cape Jervis, 616 kilometres away

^{_{Here we go!}}

Spalding is a small rural town in the Mid-North region of South Australia

It has a pub, a general store, an oval, a bowling green, a school, a police station and a bunch of decent people. Most of whom I don't know

The Heysen Trail took me out of town and along the edge of a paddock

^{_{Looking back on where I'd just been}}

^{_{...and across to Spalding}}

Following the fenceline lead me to a small iron gate

Passing through, the trail joined up with an old friend

The Bundaleer Channel!

Though in some sections it was looking a little worse for wear...

I guess the concrete in these parts was washed away during what must have been some extreme flooding events over the last century

Hard to fathom how that's possible, but it's easy to underestimate nature

The Heysen Trail runs parallel to the Bundaleer Channel for a while

Perambulating away...

I walked past this one spot and heard a rustling as I went

I stopped and looked around, trying to work out where the sound was coming from

It was a snake

Also known as snek, nope rope, or my personal favourite, danger noodle

Specifically, it was an Eastern brown snake

Pseudonaja textilis

The second-deadiest inland venomous snake on Earth, behind the Inland Taipan, Oxyuranus microlepidotus, which also lives in Australia

As you can see, the grass on the trail had been cut fairly short. There wasn't much length for it to hide in

My feet would have passed within 30 centimetres of our scaly friend, and I didn't see him until I was already a few metres ahead, looking back

He was either basking in the sun when the sound of my walking disturbed him

Unlikely, as I would have noticed on approach

Or, he picked the most inopportune time possible to emerge from his underground winter slumber

It might have been a case of the latter, because as I stood and watched, he was frantically searching for the entrance to his burrow within the stubble

Prodding the ground here and there with his nose, he'd look back to check on me, then prod around some more, then look back. Prod, prod. Look back. This went on for at least half a minute. Finally, he found what he was after and disappeared underground

Now imagine this all from the point of view of this poor long boi. You've been hibernating quietly underground all winter, waiting for that glorious moment when you can emerge and warm your blood under the golden sun

The surrounding soil feels a little warmer than usual. This is it, you decide, making a tentative slither toward the surface

And just as you catch your first glimpse of sunlight in many months, some enormous, hulking, bipedal monster lumbers past, mere inches from your snout. You can't just reverse-slither back to safety. So in a panic you pop out of the ground completely, turn around faster than you've ever turned around before, and...

Argh!

Where's my burrow!

Where? Where?!

Come on, come on!

Argh! It's still there. Why did it stop?!

Where are you! Come on! Come on! Please be here. Please! I WAS JUST IN THERE!

Argh!

Is it looking at me!?

Argggggggggh!

When suddenly,

*slooop!*

^{_{Phew! Safety...}}

^{_{Maybe I'll wait a little longer. Sure am hungry...}}

And with that, I continued on my way

That's enough anthropomorphism for today

A few kilometres later, the Trail and the Channel diverged

^{_{The Heysen Trail shown in red}}

But I decided to keep following the Channel, as I knew the end was nearby

That's why the Strava screenshot shows me backtracking a bit in the bottom right

I didn't make it to the end when I tried walking the full length of the channel the other week, and from the time I've spent lately studying the satellite images, I knew there was a weir there

Until recentIy, I worked in the water supply for the city I live. During that time, I was able to collect a few heritage photos of the Bundaleer Channel, taken around the time it was built

If you've read this earlier post of mine, you'll know what I'm talking about:

One of my goals on that walk was to recreate some of these heritage photos

^{_{See the weir in the background?}}

When I got to the end of the Channel, I got my chance with these three:

And here's my attempts:

How things change...

Having got them as close to the originals as I could, I headed back to join up with the Heysen Trail again, wanting to get a bit farther along the track before dark

^{_{Someone left a bike here...}}

Golden hour was then upon me and it was time to set up camp and bed down for the night

Not a bad distance for day one...

Day 1 - 30 Aug 2021
Start: -33.5011456,138.6109582
(Spalding town footbridge)
End: -33.537746, 138.665945
(Yakilo Homestead road)

Day 2

The next morning...

^{_{Packed up, ready to go again}}

Today's walking took me along dirt roads, past farmers paddocks and eventually into a range of hills

The uphill sections were tough, the pain in my feet and shoulders was searing at times. I was carrying my home on my back, like a turtle, and the weight was bearing down on me hard. At many points I wished I was a @turtlewithwings, but alas, I am human. A mere human being, going for a walk

One of the highlights of this day were all the drystack slate walls:

I assume they were built by the early pastoral settlers to keep their sheep and cattle in, before wire fences became an option

The end of the day grew near and I was exhausted, so I found one suitable for pitching my tent behind, out of the wind...

... and set up camp for the night

^_Dinner

Saw a couple of rabbits while looking down the hill, which @bunny11 was happy to hear about later. Managed to catch this photo of one with it's ears sticking up. It's pelt was a bright ginger colour, unusual for a wild bun

Day 2 - 31 Aug 2021
Start: -33.537746, 138.665945
(Yakilo Homestead road)
End: -33.524735, 138.699725
(Drystack wall near Whistling Trig campsite)

Day 3

With my camp packed up again, I set off. There was only a couple more hills to go and then the trail made a turn down into a valley

I was looking forward to that. There was no respite from the wind up here. Constantly beating. It was the kind of gale where you felt like an active participant in the erosion process

No wonder they've built a windfarm along this ridge

I looked up and saw something familiar in the distance...

It was a Triangulation Station, same as the one from my hometown FLAK video

^{_{Whistling. An appropriate name}}

I could refill my drinking water here, which was perfect timing as I was running low

About an hour of walking later, the Heysen Trail turned down a dirt road. Twenty steps off the slopes into the valley saw the wind calm to a gentle breeze

I was surprised by how soon it let up, but very grateful

I came across this overflowing header tank a short while later:

The flow was pretty constant

And I was quite tempted to strip off then and there and have my first "shower" in days, but decided against it and pushed on

By now I was closing in on the town of Hallett. The promise of staying in four solid walls at the Old Hallett Railway Station spurred me on, and I covered my longest distance yet

Day 3 - 01 Sep 2021
Start: -33.524735, 138.699725
(Drystack wall near Whistling Trig campsite)
End: -33.4211566,138.8920262
(Old Hallett Railway Station)

Thanks for sticking with me so far! I think I'm going to leave it here for now. I'm writing from my phone on the trail and it's really time I be making tracks

I'll share my time in Hallett with you in a separate post

This one's long enough

Especially now that I'm going to talk about the magnets...

In my Going for a Walk Soon post, I mentioned magnets at the end but didn't explain what that was all about

So here they are:

I had 500 printed up to take with me and I'm sticking them to any metallic objects I find along the way

Scanning the QR code takes you to the @hive.magnets account, which I set up to be a landing page for potential new Hive owners

It's my contribution to marketing the network and I hope to get some new folks involved. People that might never have discovered Hive otherwise

Check out the post I made for that account here

I tried to strike a balance between keeping it simple and explaining Hive comprehensively. Didn't want to overload anyone reading it for the first time. I hope it's informative and persuasive. Tell me what you think