13th August

Day 4 - Mt Dale to Monadnocks

This morning Rone and I were up before 5 am. Operating by torchlight as it wasn't light until 6:45 am (5:15 by the time we reached Albany as we were further East and it was past the Spring Solstice by then). The routine would be pack up bedding, deflate mattress, Rone would do yoga and I would read the bible. I would have breakfast first since we only had his fuel stove for now. Rone would have breakfast then packs would be packed, finally I would change into the clothes for walking and head off before freezing to death. 

I headed off at 6:30 am in the dark following the Waugal's as they reflected well along the track. I had my second breakfast 8.5 km later at Brookton where we found to our disappointment that the End to ender we had been following and hoping to catch today had given up. Apparently he had overexerted himself to move on from Helena and had bad headaches and fever so I started to hope there was nothing wrong with the tank water as the fear is dead rat or possum = Delly Belly. We didn't bother to treat tank water even though we were advised to by signs. No one else seemed to treat it either and we didn't have any side effects except I had bad bad wind but I rather put that down to high fibre/fatty food.

Crossed the Canning river in the mid afternoon in the drizzle on the first sizeable bridge so far. This was the first of the large rivers we were to see as we headed South. A 200 m ascent to Monadnocks was following annoying trail bike trails - this was the only down side to the walk I felt as many parts of the track had evidence of trail bike usage even though there is a steep $20000 fine for this.

Monadnocks is a beautiful campsite looking out over some lovely Jarrah forests. It felt to us that the walk kept getting better and better.

Day5 Monadnocks to Nerang Campsite