Gordon River and The Thumbs

[Minty]

Having been told there was a campsite "at Gordon Gorge," I organised an overnighter to The Thumbs, giving two North American's their first taste of Tasmanian walking. Despite a fairly depressing forecast, we cheerfully set off up the start of the Clear Hill track and dropped off the Eastern side of the ridge as the cloud closed in. I began to regret my decision to traverse diagonally down the Eastern slopes when we got caught in several narrow scrub filled gullies with evil little cliffs on either side. We got through them with a few fairly gross climbing/scrub clutching moves and were soon on easy leads and the even easier button grass highway of the Clear Hill plains which took us North towards the Gordon. The famed camping spot was looking increasingly mythical as we entered the reasonably thick forest half a K from the river. However by sheer chance we stumbled upon a weird bare clearing with plenty of space, there being nothing else remotely campable in the whole area. In the afternoon we followed a creek North and after a few hundred meters of easy rainforest creeping we hit the Gordon at a huge beautiful bend with small rapids and waterfalls.

After half a day of heavy rain we were expecting the second day to be slightly better. After some sadistic glimpses of sunshine, the weather was back to its cold, wet ways and my gore-tex jacket seeming only to slightly delay the inevitable saturation. We broke camp and headed up the north-Western most spur of The Thumbs. We hit various patches of banksia, bauera and scorparia on a long, convoluted route that traversed the west face and went up a steep gully. Only two of us went up on to the ridge top, summiting in ridiculously low visibility a sluggish 3 hours after starting the climb. After nearly wandering off the wrong side, we found our third member and descended, collected our packs then crossed back across gloriously small button grass clumps to the base of clear hill. Thinking a direct route up would be wiser after our adventures the day before, we slogged up an exhausting 500 meters, to be greeted with the truly demoralising, curling up in a ball-inducing sight of a mess of seemingly random cliffs and scrub between us and where we knew the Clear hill track went down the ridge. After a cold, grim food stop we set of into the maelstrom with a suitably epic frame of mind. Luckily the cliffs were not as monstrous as they had appeared looming out of the fog and after a long half hour of stumbling about in the scrub we hit the track with clumsy, frozen handed high fives all round. We virtually skipped down the track to the car. My international companions agreed that it was not what they had been expecting.

[pazzar]

Where are the photos??
It is certainly a bit easier in good conditions, picking the right leads would be tough in bad weather.

[stepbystep]

Haha they'll never com back! Is it to late to give you a waypoint for that campsite?

[Minty]

Camera died.