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.
