Bibbulmun - Overnighters with young kids

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Bibbulmun - Overnighters with young kids

Postby Burnsy » Wed 11 Mar, 2015 9:21 am

With our youngest now being 3.5 we are now at a point where we can mix up the camper and car touring with some walks. Given we live in the Bibbulmun Track Northern terminus town of Kalamunda, the track was a given as a good place to start.

For those not familiar, from the website http://www.bibbulmuntrack.org.au, “The Bibbulmun Track is one of the world's great long distance walk trails, stretching nearly 1000km from Kalamunda, a suburb in the hills on the outskirts of Perth, to the historic town of Albany on the south coast. It passes through the heart of the scenic south west of Western Australia. The Track is for walkers only and is signposted with yellow triangular markers symbolising the Waugal, the rainbow serpent of the Aboriginal Dreaming. The Track takes walkers through towering karri and tingle forests, down mist-shrouded valleys, over giant granite boulders and along breathtaking coastal heathlands. It passes through many of the most beautiful national parks of the south west forests and coastline.”

This is just the start of our Bibbulmun journey and I will add to this post as we complete further sections over the coming years. I will try and include relevant info about walking with young kids as I could find very little on the net and all my past walking and hiking experience has been with 10-17 year olds so could only base expectations on what we had experienced on day walks while touring with my two. Hopefully others who may be starting out with young walkers will find my ramblings of some use.

Pack weights with 8 litres of water were as follows: Mike 16.5kg (6 litres water), Erin 11.7kg (2 litres water), Maya 2.6kg, Neve 1.1kg. I will make the point for anyone else considering walking with kids that I would not expect kids to carry even this amount of weight without a decent backpack, especially not some Chinese school bag style one. Based on this trip I would think that Maya is capable of having a litre of water in a hydration pack added to her pack (and she has asked for one).

We started at the Camel farm out of Kalamunda at 3pm with Hewitt’s Hill camp being the destination for the night, a distance of 2.9km according to the Bibbulmun trip planner. I set the GPS out of interest as I was keen to gather some info to help with planning future trips. The trip planner was spot on distance wise and you can see our average speed was little leg speed and over the two hours it took us to cover the distance we stopped for longer than we walked, to be fair we did have a break while we grabbed a geocache along the way.

Day one GPS log
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The start
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The ubiquitous track markers
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The trick to happy walkers - “So let me get this right, if I find three yellow snake triangles you will give me a lolly snake?”
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Afternoon snack break half way with a geocache to keep it interesting
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“This counts as two snake triangles dad!”
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The Hewitt’s Hill hut was being used by a lone hiker so given that two little girls are a lot of things but quiet isn’t one of them we made camp at one of the outer sites so he could enjoy some peace.
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It wasn’t long after we started making camp that Maya (miss 6.5) spotted the first kangaroo tick, this was no surprise (although Erin was in denial about this likelihood due to her having – before today, a phobia of them). We have dealt with plenty of ticks before while touring with the 4wd and camper but I must say I have never experienced anything like this. In total we only found three kangaroo ticks and these are not a problem as you can always see and feel them crawling on you given their size. I have never seen so many tiny ticks. Usually we come across fully grown small ticks that are match head size, these were all much smaller nymphal size which are sometimes referred to as pepper ticks due to their being about the size of ground pepper and if your half blind like me you really have to look close to see the legs. They were everywhere and on everyone and we spent the next 24 hours preening each other like monkeys. Erin reckons her phobia is now gone as it was all we could do to accept them as part of the experience and not stress too much about them. We had significant rain (25mm) two weeks ago and I think this may have triggered a new lifecycle that we landed right in the middle of.

They were easiest to spot on the girls white skin and on the orange of tent, otherwise they were pretty much invisible. This shot of the tent in the late afternoon (after being set up for around ½ an hour)shows over 25 and that is without being able to see all of them on the lower dark section. When we lifted shirts and dropped pants it was the same. On getting home we threw the girls into the salt pool before a long deep double strength Detol bath with some manual removal this got rid of them all.
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Day two saw us awake to a beautiful cool morning and move straight up to the hut for breakfast de-tick and pack up as the lone hiker had left predawn. The track has these huts every 10-20km and they are fantastic for walkers giving you somewhere to sit and in most cases water (a scarcity in the northern Darling Ranges this time of year).

Granite outcrops with hut in the background – I carried the tent over to make it easy to pack up out of the tick infestation as they were not as bad around the hut.
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Breakfast in the hut, there is room for 8 to sleep in the hut if you double bunk.
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The marri trees which are the predominant species in this area were in full bloom and it has been a really heavy set this year. This was evidence by the nearly pure honey that was dripping out of the tree canopies and staining the ground and making the ants happy.
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The staining on the timber here is all nectar from the trees above
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Leaves from the forest floor with globules of nectar on them were a treat the girls enjoyed along with sucking it straight out of the blossom
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Enjoying a walk through the morning shadows
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Day two had a fair bit of up and down through valleys that took it out of Neve (miss 3.5) which means Erin and I took a few shifts carrying her but she walked the majority of the way. With pack weight being down from having used up 5 litres of water since starting and about 1kg of food this was not really a problem for a couple of 100m or so stints.

The real “Tough Mudda”
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The track was crossed by some of the mountain bike trails through this section and we were given a demonstration of how some mountain bikers have kept their road arrogance when two came flying through the middle of us without any acknowledgement or reduction of pace. No wonder bike riders get such a hard time in the media and online.

Views a plenty as we travelled along the ridges
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The end in sight, Mundaring Weir in the distance
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Mundaring Weir from South Ledge lookout, our pickup point
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Total kilometers for day two was 5 by the time we walked to the lookout and back, in all a great effort for little legs. Maya got her first experience of burning calves walking up the final ascent to South Ledge carpark from the valley and laughed the whole way through it. Moving average for the day was pretty much identical to day one which was good to know for future planning. With a morning start that allowed for a decent lunch break I reckon we could manage a 6-7km day at a push. For now we will wait for the weather to cool a bit, the ticks to disappear and plan our next overnighter.
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Burnsy
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Re: Bibbulmun - Overnighters with young kids

Postby Lizzy » Wed 11 Mar, 2015 7:01 pm

Well done! Perhaps some permethrin to wash the clothes in?? Those ticks would be very annoying.
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Re: Bibbulmun - Overnighters with young kids

Postby Burnsy » Wed 11 Mar, 2015 9:41 pm

Do you mean use permethrin to ensure no live ticks in the clothes or to help prevent them next time? Detol worked well to get them out of us and and a hot wash would have sorted them in the clothes. As for those on the tents and gear I just left everything two weeks before unpacking so they would have died of starvation by then. It is three weeks on now and we are all still covered in pock marks and some are still itchy.
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