2023-12-25 -37 145

Location

Banksia Park

Participants

Expedition 1:

Steve
EB

Expedition 2:

Talex

Expedition 3:

rwh
Tom

Expedition 4:

pwc

Plans

Lots of people planning to squeeze it around christmas plans.

Expeditions

Expedition 1 (Steve and EB)

A very rainy Christmas day left us in Ivanhoe, bellies bursting, with a car, only a few kilometres away. Feeling rather soft for not being on bikes, we drove to Banksia Park, me trying to navigate from memory and doing a pretty bad job of it. The North East Link freeway disaster looked suitably apolocalyptic, with dozens of mobile cranes and other heavy machinery around.

We drove some distance in and parked at an arbitrary point. Immediately we heard kookaburras and our spirits lifted. It's beautiful here! As we wandered along, we saw ducks too.

Originally we were hoping the point would just be on the grass, but soon we had to take the plunge into the extremely wet undergrowth, stomping through wandering trad. The phone GPS was being rather erratic. It showed 1 metre, but then quickly jumped up to 4m, so I wasn't quite satisfied. We did a lot more stomping through the bush and getting wet, turning in circles until we ended up at exactly the same spot, where it read 1 metre again. That seemed good enough now, so we plopped out.

Then we did a nice short walk along the path, saw a few more birds and trees, and found the car again.

Setting the scene
Spot the kookaburra
Ducks!
EB braves the wet wandering trad
Success!
Getting out

Expedition 2

I'd been hoping to get this on the way to/from christmas festivities. Departing from home, things looked good with a break in the rain. One minute from the turn off, the rain returns. I quickly decide to detour on my way home.

Approach after parking is pretty easy, I find Stevage's path in for a nice easy geohash (and a chance to explore a park I'd never been in before).

Expedition 3

Expedition 4

My original plan was to go early in the morning prior to the excess of eating and drinking that is Christmas. However, I was lured by people suggesting a late hash and (more importantly) sleeping in a lot.

This hash was reasonably close to where I live. This would have been more helpful if I was coming from home, but instead I went to my parents’ place for family Christmas, so it was rather further away. Given the intense rain when I was getting to Christmas, and threats of a “severe thunderstorm” from the weather bureau, I was considering just staying the night at my parents’. However, at 10pm, laden with Christmas presents and stuffed with food, I got on my bike and went into the rain.

The ride there went well, for the parts I knew, and terrifyingly, for the parts I didn’t know. There was at least one gravel-mud section that went OK although there was some dubious loss of traction from my svelte road bike tyres. I also made a questionable dash across Banksia St/Manningham Rd (on the way back I would discover this was unnecessary).

It was now extremely wet, and dark, and also there was occasional lightning.

Hopefully the hashpoint is through that tree/bush/disaster situation (I later learn I could go around)

I left my bike next to a tree and blundered in the general direction of the hash. I was confronted by a large tree/bush situation that admitted no obvious way in. I backed away and wandered a little bit to see if I could find another way, but this was unsuccessful as it was quite dark. I did however collect an array of bark and spiders on my body.

If you can’t go around it, you have to go through it, so with helmet firmly on I bashed my way through the brush and eventually found the hashpoint in a SpiderZone. Thankfully I was able to trick the GPS into thinking I was in the spiderbush, and I went to take a screenshot and... turned the phone off because it’s a new phone with a different button layout. Or alternatively, it was a sign that if you’re tricking the GPS you’re not hashing properly.

With the phone off it was now pleasantly dark, by which I mean, I could feel more spiders and could now hear an animal moving around in a terrifying way. The only option seemed to turn the phone back on and then squeeze in to the spider-lair, hold my phone out, and scream like a small child, which eventually produced an adequately close reading.

It was now raining even more. The good thing was that this washed the spiders off me a bit. The bad thing was I was now completely lost and had only a vague idea where my bike was.

I turned around and... saw the path that had been made by Expeditions 1, 2 and 3. Following this out was easy and had less tree climbing compared to my original route, and almost no spiders.

Not always easy getting home

On my way out I tested out my brakes by almost crashing in to a wombat. The rain also closed the path I’d intended to use to get home requiring further detour.

Wildlife report: 3 × kangaroos, 1 × wombat, ∞ × spiders, 1 × terrifying noise creature (possibly wombat)