Thanks to the efforts of Kim Rosen, President of Melbourne Walking Club, we will soon have a new track to add to our walks programmes. We’ve all seen lots of tracks marked on maps, but when we try to walk them, it’s impossible because they are so overgrown. Most leaders just give up at that point and put on a different walk elsewhere. Not Kim however. She contacted ParksVic and eventually got this joint project up and running.
Volunteers from Melbourne Walking Club (the lead club for this effort), Boroondara Bushwalkers and Melbourne Women’s Walking Club have participated. 19 participants overall, gave a total of 59 volunteer working days. We usually had 3 ParksVic rangers managing the work each day.
We met the rangers at either the Mt Donna Buang car park or the Rainforest Gallery car park. They have the gate keys so we were able to drive to the start of the walking track, reducing the distance we had to carry all the heavy gear each day. The day began with a thorough safety briefing, training in the use of the brush cutters when required, collecting other gear such as loppers and rakehoes, then heading off to the target section of the track for that day. The rangers used the mini chain saws – surprisingly powerful for their size. The first 4 days we worked up hill from the Road 2 junction. It took us 4 days to clear up to the summit of Mt Boobyalla. We then began work from the other side via the reopened Acheron Way and Road 4.
Even with this number of people, we only managed to clear about 350 to 550 metres per day. We cleared about 2 metres in width. Once we got to our target section of track, the rangers and the brush cutter team head led off; chain sawing and slashing all the scrub. There is quite a range of plants; bitter pea, olearia, flax lilies, wattles, beech myrtle (which we leave) and lots of others we couldn’t identify. Following the brush cutters were the groomers. With the rakehoes – those heavy-duty tools you see fire fighters using to rake over smouldering embers – we raked up and cleared all the cut material and tossed it off to the side of the track. That exposed the remnants left behind by the brush cutters – the 5 to 10 cm of the base of the saplings that the brush cutters couldn’t always get. The final task was to use the loppers to cut as low to the ground as we could to eliminate those nasty trip hazards and those higher branches waiting to poke us in the eye. Some things we couldn’t clear. Storms dropped some quite large trees on the track which we had to detour around to continue our work. The rangers were able to call on the “firies” to cut through these obstacles.
Although this work has been mostly over summer, it has not been too hot to work as the temperature is much cooler up higher. The rangers are very safety conscious and have cut work short when the wind got too strong one day, and when the humidity was really high and we had some sort of pollen or spores in the air sending us all into coughing fits. The odd leech or two made their appearance.
The track is now clear and ready for you to walk. You would need to organise a car shuttle to make a 15 km one way walk. From Mt Donna Buang car park, you can walk down to the start of Road 2. The newly cleared Mt Boobyalla track branches off to the right after about 1.5 km. This continues up and over the top of Mt Boobyalla, for about 3.5km to join with Road 4 where you turn right again and head down Road 4 to the junction with the Acheron way.
The track needs lots of walkers to prevent it growing over again. Do it soon; it’s a great walk.