Readers Warning: if you are seriously considering walking the Port Davey Track please move directly to the next post – do not read further! The author accepts no responsibility for cancellation of planned trips on this track!!
The real story of the PDT
Is there any way to describe the walking conditions on this track? Many wisely decide that it is just not worth the trauma of walking through it. Yes, psychological trauma! and yes! through it. You relatively rarely walk on it. We estimated that at least 50% if not 60% of the Port Davey track is through various categories and consistencies of mud, which means somewhere between 35 – 40 km of the total 70 km. Wading, sloshing, slipping, and sliding are all do-able, the challenging moments are when you are literally sucked into deep mud and get stuck fast, hardly able to extract yourself. It is either laugh or cry (and usually both).
We reflected that if Eskimos have 20 words for types of snow, Port Davians have at least 20 descriptors (and many expletives) for the amount, consistency, colour, smell and depth of mud.
My (Merran’s) average fall rate was 20 per day. If you tried to dodge or walk around deep mud you easily found a deeper hole. If you sidestepped it, you would slip off the tough grass roots into it anyway. Just as you were conscious of the relief of a section of firm ground, and your confidence would reappear, you would sink into yet another mud hole. Whenever I fell, it took an enormous amount of energy to get up again, and sometimes I was totally unable to get enough traction in the mud to lift myself against the weight of my pack. I often had to get Tim to assist me … One of the songs we sing at church includes the lines, “He lifted me out of the miry clay and put my feet on solid ground”. That will always have graphic meaning for me from now on.
We came to be suspicious of the gullies. They tended to be just as muddy as the tracks over the plains but with the added joy of tangled roots, branches, thick cutting grass, fallen trees to clamber over or under, with a knee-deep creek to somehow get over and scramble up the other side. Our ankles twisted, our bodies turned, Tim assisting me to arise time and time again, our walking was dominated by the constant effort of finding safe footing.
We sloshed and slid through the Lost World Plateau, glad for rests and our Helinox chairs that enabled us to sit dry on the occasional rocky gravel hillocks. At these moments we were relieved to get our boots off and tip the water out of them, then rinse our feet in a creek and let them dry out for a bit, before putting our rather unpleasant socks back on for the next round. Why we ever bothered to rinse socks, boots and gaiters I do not know! We smile now to think of the shocked look on the faces of newly arrived walkers at Melaleuca as we simply strode straight through the muddy sections they were studiously seeking to avoid.
Ah, they would say with just a little awe – they have done the Port Davey Track.
