Easter 2006

EASTER 2006

The Tough Tracks 4x4 club and the Qld Nissan Patrol Club both had a trip on to Emu Creek Extreme Retreat for the Easter break, I am a member of both so I got to do to trips at once.
I traveled down very late on Thursday night past cloud encircled hills
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and couldn’t help my self … stopped for coffee at the driver reviver
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The next morning I had a look at the main campsite
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and took a pic of our campsite overlooking the swimming hole
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I then headed off by myself [but did tell the others where I was going]to try and find an old barely used track out to the waterfall and spent 4 hours clearing and searching but ended up at a dead end just past a deliberately blocked off track on the right.
It was getting late in the day so I headed back to camp before the others decided to come looking for me.

That night we had a tagalong behind Blair [the owner of the park] over some of the newly dozed tracks in the bike area.

Saturday morning I headed off with Blair and several other vehicles out to the blocked off track and we headed down the very overgrown track to the right.
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We cleared a fallen tree from the Lantana and I then drove through looking at the sky to find the gap between the trees which indicated where the track used to be and shortly afterwards we crossed Girard creek just above the waterfall and walked down about 50 metres to the top of the falls.
A few of us climbed to the bottom to take pics but the falls were in a dark inaccessible corner of the rocks and were not easy to get a pic.
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We then drove for about 3 minutes to a Tar road and Headed back to camp as Blair had stuffed a clutch slave cylinder.

On Sunday morning we were joined by two photographers with Don jumping in with Brett L and Julie jumping in with me, we drove through the new creek track with lots of bouncing and crashing over rocks and one deepish section [about 600-700mm deep] of water then headed out to the back of the park to tackle some steep sideslopes and a rough gully track with Julie looking a little worried in places.
Jody popped a tyre of a rim in the zook
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then we stopped at a steep climb with a rock ledge where Brett L had several tries to get up the ledge but couldn’t quite make it although his 38” swampers made it a much bigger step up.
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Then Evan had a go without any luck
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I thought I may as well have a bit of a play and to my Surprise Julie wanted to jump in for the ride.

The ute was struggling to even get to the ledge due to me only having the 35” Maxxis Bighorn muddies on and when I hit the ledge it took me by surprise when it went up and it was then that I realized that I had no idea what line to take as I hadn’t looked at the top section as I didn’t think I had a hope in hell of making it.

I nailed it and we bounced and crashed from rock to rock and eventually diffed out on a large rock so with a few tries at different lines we finally got moving again and made it to the top with a little “woohoo” coming from the passenger seat.

Brett T then had a go in his 38” Kreepy krawler shod patrol ute and made it up in one shot.

We followed some more gully tracks with some awesomely steep sideslopes with a +10 pucker factor and eventually all got out ok except for Peter who broke a CV near the end but still drove out.

We then headed back to camp for a night around the campfire
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A group from the Nissan club had gone up a track that was very difficult for standard vehicles and had two vehicles very stuck at either end of five of the vehicles and had left those cars there overnight to avoid doing any unnecessary damage.

Brett T drove in from the bottom and I reversed in from the top to find the top vehicle secured to a stump with a tyre off the rim and no way to get to it from the side.
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We dragged the bottom truck out first
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and four of the vehicles then headed back to camp while we winched and dragged the top vehicle up to a spot where we could repair the flat then I drove up first with Col towing the stricken patrol up a couple of knarly bits
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then we headed back down the main track to camp to pack up.

After packing up I headed off the long way to see what I could see and passed some tank traps

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next to an old wooden bridge
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looked like a nice spot to camp.

I then drove to Taloom falls
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and on the way back out from the falls stopped to get a pic of this old barn

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and an old shack beside the road.
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Then I headed for home after a very relaxing weekend just camping and 4wdriving with some great people.