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We went to Namadji National Park to do the Mt Clear Ride, including my husband David. I decided not to go, as I had a bout of food poisoning the week before, and didn't think I would be up for the ride. I stayed at the campsite with my brother, sister-in-law and the kids. We did some photography and organised a picnic lunch, ready for the riders when they got back (we were expecting them at 2.30pm). Well - they didn't arrive, it got to about 4pm and we really started to get worried that something may have happened to them. I went and looked at all of the other campsites, just in case they didn't have enough energy to get back to our campsite at Mt Clear, but they weren't there - I went to the visitors centre, but it was closed. In the meantime a stranger (those name was Terence) had spoken to my brother and he started looking on some of the fire trails (he was a volunteer for the National Park on some regeneration project), so knew the park better than us. None of us had any luck, so we decided to wait at the campsite, while Terence went for help, this was at 8pm. Jeff and I sent my sister-in-law home with the boys, as they were getting tired. An hour and a half later Terence hadn't come back, so we drove down the dirt rode and came across Terence and the ranger - they had blown a tire on the way out. So they changed the tire and we went out to the campsite - where we all got into an excuse for a 4WD (a RAV4!) to start the search. The ranger called Emergency Communications on the CB on the way out (great lot of good this did). We decided to look on the loop trail (which is where they had planned to ride), but we got part way round and I told the ranger that they would not have come this way as it was too rough for the 4WD let alone the mountain bikes. So she decided to complete the loop and then go to a hut where they may have stopped for the night. Only problem was that she missed the turn to the hut, and ended up taking the wrong turn (this was at about midnight), we took a few more turns and then we didn't know where we were and the terrain was getting really rough (too rough for the pissy RAV4, we had to get out so the ranger could drive it up the bad hills - it has no low range gearing and no gutts, we were bottoming out quite a bit). At 2.30am in the morning we blew another tire (with no spares left) and were down to below empty on the fuel gauge - the 4WD had suffered a bit of panel damage by this time, and the under carriage was a bit of a mess. We slept in the RAV4 for the night (not the most comfortable place to sleep!), and got up with the birds the next morning. The sunrise was beautiful. |