A 25-hour hiking race? Why not! We'd done a 12-hour and 6-hour rogaine, so now a 25-hour challenge. Rogaining is a team sport which involves cross country navigation and strategy. This time it was up in the forest and scrub of Wirrabara and Kate joined our team, bringing along her navigation prowess.
Rogaine, Wirrabara Forest
While studying the map and planning our route in the hours before the rogaine, I made the comment that the scrub near the ridge line was, from memory, pretty thick. A big bushfire had burnt through much of the area in May, so we were hoping this would have cleared some of the dense ridge. It had, leaving a loose, sandy and rocky surface that was still hard to climb. Not all was clear though, through the untouched native scrub we managed about 1km/h, and gained lots of scratches for our efforts. We were pretty relieved when we finally made the ridge with its road!
On our way through the scrub, we spied a girl waiting on a distant hill, apparently for the rest of her team. But not so, over the other side some ten minutes later, we found a single person – this is a team sport btw – asking whether we might have seen a girl in a blue top! We had of course, but on the other side of the hill. A wee bit silly that they got separated, we met up with them later that night and they had spent an hour and a half finding each other.
We tackled the higher ridge and scrub in the daylight first, returning after dark via the lower forest with its gentle hills, open forest and easy to navigate service tracks.
A couple of the controls (point markers) were over the other side of the ridge, which meant climbing back up to the ridge again afterwards. That was a bit tough! At one control, number 71, we spent some time discussing where we thought we were, and each of our interpretations of the topographic map. Down we went, but we certainly weren’t coming back up the same way, pleasantly open that it was, we skirted across the side of the ridge to another track.
Seven hours into the rogaine we watched the sun set from the ridgeline, exchanging tips with teams coming the other way.
In the darkness we descended off the ridge and back into the forest, armed with our head torches of various brightnesses, and the full moon. At the furthest point from the Hash House – the base of the rogaine – we sat down at a picnic table on the summit of Mt Ellen and had a moonlit picnic. From here we trundled back to the Hash House, thinking of the enormity of our plan which still required a three-hour walk back to the Hash House base when we were dead tired.
At 2am we sat down for some hot food and in front of the warm fire at the Hash House in Wirrabara’s old schoolhouse.
Armed with four hours sleep, and with the warm sun up, we returned to our rogaining. This time we planned a shorter route, with more options to return early - and most of all - an easy walking route. We were back at ten past 11 in the morning, with 50 minutes to spare. We weren’t keen to climb a nearby scrub hill to fill our last 50 minutes, we were all limping in one form or another.
We scored 1760 points, covering 63km, and came 7th overall, and 4th in the mixed category. We spent 15 hours on Saturday, 11am to 2am (49km), and 3 hours out on Sunday morning (14km).
View all results on the SA Rogaining website.
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