A week of walking on the Central Plateau exploring new areas including Ritters track (described as "a track in name only"). We started and finished at Lake Mackenzie, following the Blue Peaks track to Turanna Bluff and the Walls of Jerusalem, before taking Ritters track to Lake Nameless and then the Lake Explorer track back our starting point. Along the way we experienced stunning scenery, wild animals, birthday cake and managed to swim most days which is almost unheard of (for me at least).
While camped in the Walls of Jerusalem near Zion gate we came across a Tassie devil trying to pull a wallaby carcass out of a tarn. It ran away when it saw us but the next morning my water bottle had disappeared. After much searching it was found some distance away with the lid covered in bite marks. It seemed a strange choice of things to take so we thought perhaps this was a curious juvenile devil. Here's a photo taken the day before on a devil which had been trying to retrieve a dead wallaby from a tarn.
Ritters track turned out to be as elusive as I had heard and we would have struggled to follow it without a GPS route. Originally built over 100 years ago for taking stock to the Walls of Jerusalem in summer, the track is really just a collection of cairns scattered across the plateau, each bearded in lichen making them blend in with all the other rocks. Tricky to find in good weather (and ours was exceptional) it would been a challenge to find them in more typical plateau weather. Now it would only be used by the occasional bushwalker or fisherman.
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