YENGO NATIONAL PARK – 25-26 July 2026
This trip could also be called “looking for a needle in a haystack“! It’s been many years since I came up with an “overnight adventure” … off track, a bit of navigation involved and somewhere where we hadn’t been before. So, I decided that I should get back to planning adventures … it was a trip that was a good idea at the time, but then almost everything went to s**t.
Trish M, Heather, Jeff B and Jim C put their hands up, I also sent word out to Brad (come on my easy trip!). (Thankfully) Brad couldn’t make it and Jim cancelled due to being unwell. So, the four of us met up at Mogo Campground. Unfortunately, I had driven Trish to Mogo, but along the way her vertigo/car sickness kicked in and by the time we got to the start of the walk, she wasn’t well enough to actually do the walk. So now we’re down to 3.
We reassessed our options and Trish felt that if she rested for a few hours, she’d be fine to drive home in my car, so, the three of us set off on our adventure (note, Trish stayed with the cars for a couple of hours and then safely drove home). The only “problem” was that Trish and I were intending to share Trish’s tent, and I didn’t think I could carry said tent on the trip. I did some serious sweet talking to persuade Jeff that he should let me sleep in his tent. He considers it a “1 person tent” but eventually he agreed that 2 people “may” fit in (after all it is supposed to be for 2!), thank you Jeff!
As we were restricted to Jeff’s vehicle, we decided to walk down to the start of the walk and leave his car at the end of our route.
After roughly a 2k walk down the fire trail, we came to the point where I thought we should cross the creek and head up for a spur (avoiding private property). This involved a jump across the creek, Jeff and I were looking for somewhere without a jump, then we saw that Heather had jumped across and didn’t get wet, so we followed her lead.
The scrub across the creek and up to the spur was horrific, I wrote it off as “lots of scrub at the creek level” but this wasn’t the case. We followed some wombat tracks but I was hoping that once on the spur/ridge the scrub would thin out.
Before long we came to a cliff-line that wasn’t shown on the map, probably because it wasn’t all that high, maybe 20m. We veered around to the right and eventually found a route up.
This involved a pack shuffle, although without my pack (and nervous about the steepness of the route, and I just shot up to the top, leaving my pack behind and Heather kindly offered to go back to get it.
I put my camera away because I didn’t have a safe place to carry it, so not many photos for a few hours. The navigation was difficult due to the thick scrub, and I missed the first “high point”, but once we “found” it, we were on track.
It was difficult finding the two saddles that we needed to find in order to change direction. The first saddle was particularly tricky as the transition was only 10m on either end of the saddle so you could barely recognise a change in elevation.
I was congratulating myself in nailing these saddles (lol), we had stopped quite a bit to make sure we were on track and getting a grid reference from Heather (she was the only one with a GPS). We were way behind schedule, and only half way to the fire trail that we were headed for, and it was at this stage that Jeff discovered that he’d lost his phone. So, we reassessed our options. Heather and Jeff back tracked for a couple of hundred metres, but then gave up. We decided that the best option was to drop off the saddle, down to a creek, pick up water, make camp and then retrace our steps the next day, following the “thin blue line on Heather’s GPS” and (hopefully) find the black phone! Ah well!
On the way down to the creek, in the distance (about 50m away), I spotted what could be described as a “grassy meadow”, well, not much grass but almost the only scrub-free spot on the whole of the ridge. So, we decided to make camp here (only 100m from where we’d start our search the next day).
And the “campsite” had a nice view. Heather and Jeff offered to drop down into the creek (a long way down), and pick up water and I would make a flat spot for Jeff’s tent and gather firewood for the fire.
It was a long way down, very scrubby, but from Heather’s photo here, some nice flowers!
Once they returned, we set up camp, lit the fire and despite the BIG change in plans, we had a lovely evening, and it wasn’t as cold as anticipated.
The fire looks bigger than it was (Heather’s photo).
We woke up to a beautiful morning, a little chilly but we were soon warmed up once we got back to the saddle and started the search.
We followed the “blue line” on Heather’s GPS although she noted that the line wasn’t actually where we walked, but was about a 10m route, so we weren’t tracing our actual steps. There were lots of jokes about the “thin blue line” sitcom back in the 1990s. The scrub and the colour of the phone didn’t help, but over the next four hours we did our best, stopping at a spot where we thought we’d pulled out phones/GPS and checking our route and fanning out to check every spot where we may have walked. Eventually we got to the first knoll which is where Jeff thought he’d had the phone, and we gave up.
When sitting around the campfire, I’d come up with a “bright idea” to change our exit route back to the car, going down a creek, crossing over and then a short climb up to get to a direct route back to the car, avoiding the 2k walk on the fire trail. I was wanting to make it more “interesting” given that we didn’t do the actual walk we had planned. How hard could it be?
To be fair, when we started our descent down to the creek wasn’t as bad as it was on the ridge, but there were a few cliff lines that we had to navigate around.
Eventually we came to the “start” of the creek, so headed down.
Finally in the actual creek – note, not that much scrubb.
Wasn’t easy though – I didn’t have my canyon shoes on, so the rock like this was extremely slippery.
We’d head up onto the side to avoid rock hopping, then we had to “slide” down when the side got too steep.
It took longer than expected and at around 2pm we were in the main creek which thankfully with all the flood debris we weren’t walking down the creek, also, it goes through private property, so it was a “no go” area.
By this time we’re all tired (and some of us are cranky after the creek walk), so we headed up (a tedious climb that just wouldn’t end), and Jeff and Heather navigated our way to a route down to the road. We arrived at the road at about 3.30pm (my watch was flat by that time). Turned out that this route wasn’t such a good idea!
I can’t say that I “enjoyed” the walk, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, maybe my days of navigating through the wilderness are over! Bbig thanks to Jeff and Heather for coming with me, might take a while before they come on another adventure and for that matter may take a while before I come up with another Adventure with M!
Jeff’s going back to the ridge to have another look for the phone, will probably go with him as a fitness day walk!