Silver City New Mexico.

This small city in New Mexico which calls itself The Town of Silver City?  was not high on our list of priorities, we needed a place to stay between Tuscon and Santa Fe that was close to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. We hadn't done any research apart from finding a hotel. Silver City surprised us and proved to be one of the real highlights of this road and hiking trip.

If you travel in the USA you'll eventually come across towns that have been given the Disney makeover, Tombstone and Silverton come to mind. Re-creations that exist only to capture the travelers dollar, Silver City though actually lives and breathes. The main street is straight out of the 1950's and the back streets have beautiful old homes and cars that are being lived in and driven. At 6.00am people start to appear, real people. Shops start to open, joggers and dog walkers pass by, all of them  nod or say good morning.  

New Mexico really likes to use bright colours, Silver City is no exception. 

One of the great things about traveling is that you don't always know what you are going to find around the next bend or in the next town. This small part of the USA really fits into that category.

Tuscon Arizona 2017

After flying into Phoenix and spending the night there Tuscon was our next stop. We had flown from Sydney via Auckland and L.A. total traveling time to Phoenix was 24 hours. We spent the extra and flew Premium Economy, after doing that for the past few overseas trips I will never go back to long haul economy class. A nights sleep in Phoenix and we were refreshed and ready to put in a full day.

Tuscon was an unknown quantity, we planned to visit both East and West Saguaro National Parks and The Boneyard but that was the extent of our forward planning. It was hot, very hot when we arrived, around 106 F. We decided that next day we would drive up to Mt. Lemmon to escape the heat, it was much too hot to hike in the parks. Mt Lemmon was a real surprise, beautiful alpine scenery and shady hikes through the pine trees.. The 29 mile road to the top results in a 5000ft. elevation gain, the road was packed with hundreds of super fit cyclists on their weekend training rides. Very impressive. We did a short 5 km. hike on the Box Camp Trail, a nice way to get the body into the new time zone.

Box Camp Trail

Saguaro National Park was a bit disappointing, the western area of the park especially. The eastern part has more to offer but with hindsight we could have saved the $15 entry fee. The lower slopes of Mt. Lemmon have plenty of areas of cactus as do the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix, especially beside the Peralta Trail near Phoenix. We did a 5 km. hike in Saguaro East along the Douglas Spring Trail, it was a nice hike with interesting plants and scenery but eventually the heat sent us back to the car.

Douglas Spring Trail.

The Pima Air & Space Museum was very good, you could spend all day there and not see it all. The volunteers are friendly and very knowledgeable, in a few cases it was difficult to get away from them. 

The Boneyard Tour was a disappointment, you are confined to a bus and the tour is rushed. You only see a very small section of the more than 7000 planes that are stored there and photography is difficult through the tinted windows of the bus. You would see more if you drove around the perimeter fences. The amount of money that the US has spent on the military is staggering, little wonder that basic infrastructure in that country is poor. The military machine is like a giant vacuum cleaner.

It"ll never fly!!!

Camaro

One of the things on my to do list was to rent a US. built convertible while I was visiting the USA, as this was probably the last trip there I set aside the last four days of a 25 day trip to do that. The car was a 2017 Camaro, nothing exotic just the V6 model. I really was surprised just how much inexpensive US cars have improved. This car looked good, had adequate performance for the price, it had brakes that worked well and on the roads out to Globe and Payson handled very well. It was a fun experience. The SS model would have been nice but the budget didn't stretch that far.

Unfortunately mid way through day three it could not decide which gear it should be using. This resulted in a dangerous situation as we were crossing two lanes of oncoming traffic, it dropped into neutral leaving us stranded sideways across the two lanes. It eventually had a change of heart and thumped into first where it decided to stay but at least we made it across before the oncoming traffic arrived.

The Green Gully Track - 4 day hike.

Oxley Wild Rivers National Park NSW. Australia.

The Oxley Wild Rivers Park is located north of Sydney near the town of Walcha, the section we hiked through was previously used for cattle but was re gazetted as a national park in 1987. After spending four days hiking in the park it escapes me as to why anyone would want to use it for cattle, it must have been a nightmare finding them on the steep mountains and in the gorges.

The hike is controlled by the park authority and is limited to groups of 6. The total distance is 65 kms. and accommodation is in old corrugated iron drovers huts, apart from the first and last nights which are spent at Cedar Creek in Cedar Creek Cottage and Cedar Creek Lodge. The tracks are mainly on park service fire trails apart from day three which is spent wading in Green Gully Creek or finding your way along the banks when the water is too deep. It's a demanding hike, not difficult to find your way but there is no day when you can take it easy. Plenty of steep short climbs and a few really brutal ones on day two and four. The information supplied by the N.P. authority is quite poor, the scale of the map is too large to be useful and the profiles were drawn by someone who has not done the hike. GPS GPX files and profiles can be found on Wikiloc under the name Green Gully Track. Here.

Day 1 profile according to the National Parks map and then according to my Locus app.

Day 2. A 900 metre descent to Green Gully Creek and some spectacular views looking west. The descent is very steep and made more difficult because of lots of small loose stones, I wouldn't like to do it without hiking poles. They saved us numerous times but even so we still had a few tumbles. 

Green Gully Hut was a welcome sight, beautiful location, hot showers and the thought that our toughest day [as per N.P. advice] was behind us. Wrong!!

Every day was tough, day 3 in the creek was the shortest day but it was slow going. Deep pools, slippery rocks and stinging nettles if you chose the bank as an easier option. This post may give the impression that we did not enjoy the hike, nothing could be further from the truth. It was hard, there were times during those four days  when I [we] wished we had not done it but at the end all of us had big smiles on our faces and a feeling of great satisfaction. This was our first multi day hike and we are not what you would call "pro bushwalkers" but we made it and we enjoyed it.

Day four starts with a 600 metre climb over the first three kilometres, we tackled it by dividing it into a lot of very short sections. By this time we were pretty tired but we eventually got to the top of the climb and then started the next section which was still uphill but not vertical. The last 10 kilometres seemed to be never ending but the thought of a cold beer, a glass or two of red and some of Rosa's spaghetti sustained us.

Around 5.00pm. we finally crested the last hill and jogged the last 1.5 kms. to the lodge. Just kidding. We were exhausted but we made it. It was a fantastic experience. Nature provided the final spectacular touches.

I used a Huawei P9 phone for all photos, Blogger unfortunately compresses the images and takes away a lot of the finer detail.

I used the Locus app. to map the hike and create the profiles.