13 April 2019 Clear Range via The Forest Trail

A direct descent from the Clear Range to the Naas River | photo Justin S

Saturday 13 April: Clear Range – L/M. Walk in the Naas Valley FT from Caloola Farm then, up The Forest Trail to the crest of the Clear Range, to 3 geocaches on the ACT border. Around 23km and 500m climb. Map: Michelago. Leader: John Evans 0417 436 877 john@johnevans.id.au . Transport: ∼$15 per person.

Further Information

We were through here 17 Mar 18. I have no idea why we didn’t go the little further distance to today’s objective.

Summary

Distance: 20.9km | Climb: 625m | Time: 7.45am – 1.30pm (5hrs 45mins), including 25 mins of breaks and geocaching time | Grading: L/E-R; H(12-)

A hard one to grade, in that it was all fire trail, except for our return plunge down through the scrub from near the crest to rejoin the Naas Valley Fire Trail. 0.9km, 130vm descent in 30 minutes.

Photographs

Photographs are available, where you can start a large sized slideshow.

Waypoint and Track Files

Download the gpx file for this trip (if your browser does not automatically download the file, it will open the gpx file in a new window and you can then save it). To use in Google Earth, do File, Open… and select Gps or All files as the File Type.

Track Notes

We met at my old folks home and motored south on the Boboyan Rd, turning down Naas Rd after crossing the Gudgenby River. At Caloola, we drove through to cross the Naas River and were pleased to see that the ford has been remade.

New ford on the Naas River at Caloola Farm

That allowed us to drive further south through a couple of more gates to the edge of Namadgi National Park. This is all public access right of way.

Walking at 7.45am. A cool morning (deserved 2 layers for me) that soon warmed as the sun hit the fire trail on the valley floor.

6 crossings of the dry (a very occasional pool) Naas River as we walked in to near the bottom of The Forest Trail. 5.3km in 1 hour.

Strolling through the first dry crossing of the Naas River

I wanted to take my layers off, so whilst I did Martin and Justin nicked down to log geocache GC5H751 Six Streams. We then finished the remaining 1km to the fire trail junction.

Turning left, we began the walk up The Forest Trail.

View north to Mt Tennent from the bottom of The Forest Trail

It takes a big loop to the north which seems to negate some of the walk in. At last it turned south and began to seriously climb. A pause for geocache GC2J5HD Forgotten Gate, then on up to the gap. Here we climbed the little westerly knoll for geocache GC2J5HC Forgotten Views, well spotted by Brett as we cachers searched about.

Lovely views indeed. A nice spot for morning tea.

The Forgotten View

Back down on The Forest Trail, we walked a further 2.1km in 30mins to the ACT-NSW border.

The ACT-NSW border on the crest of the Clear Range

Here we found and logged GC2J5HB Forgotten Border.

Martin logs geocache GC2J5HB Forgotten Border

That satisfied my objective for the day and Martin had one more to go. We returned along the fire trail for a bit then, to change it around a bit, we plunged down the side of the range to near the track junction. Actually, there were some very helpful animal tracks at times, both on the spurs and when contouring around the top of the drainage line. It certainly saved some time – 0.9km and 130vm drop in 30mins.

Back down on the Naas Valley Fire Trail and a bit north, Martin and Justin headed for the last cache, GC2BZHF Clear to Caloola: GORGEous?. The remaining two of us were quite happy to wait on the fire trail.

A couple of kilometres north, at 12.35pm, we sat on a log on the side of the FT for lunch.