It's been a long weekend.
After doing the usual house errands/tidying stuff on Saturday, I went to Greg and Lisa's for dinner for Greg's birthday (which was on Sunday). Only I did what was essentially an "eat and run" because I had to be up early on Sunday morning and needed to get to sleep.
Sunday was Mt Barney. We hiked up Logan's Ridge, which is one of the most difficult routes up the mountain, and there probably could have been better conditions given the early morning drizzle and high winds. The "trail", which is not very defined, consists of narrow trails through bushland and some exposed rock scrambling and climbing. Given the weather conditions we had, rope and / or climbing shoes would have been a benefit, and would hopefully have helped us avoid the crazy stunts we had to pull to get to the summit (I, for example, had to be pulled onto three different ledges, and I'm pretty sure I owe Shane, Dennis and Brock a beer :) ) Why, you may ask, would someone who doesn't like heights, and most definitely doesn't like being sitting next to a 1000m+ cliff drop keep going? Simple. There was NO way I was going to get down the same way we'd come up. And it was either keep going or become one of those people who get plucked from a cliff ledge by the SES. And I guess now we know just how those people manage to get stuff in stupid places on big mountains ;) It took us about 7.5 hours to get to the summit, and about 5 hours to get back down (via the Peasants Ridge which is much easier in comparison), so yes, we started walking in the dark, and we finished walking in the dark.
On Sunday Brock, Shane and I backed up our hiking with a walk around Daisy Hill and Venmans. We were all a little sore in the morning, proceeded to get rained on a few times and a tad muddy as a result, but managed a 24.5km walk in about 4 hours and 15 min which wasn't too shabby. Sure, there's no big hills, but that was pretty much our plan seeing as we need to make sure everyone's knee's are still operational.
After all that, I'm glad I get to go to work and sit down tomorrow :)
