Met Hugh at Bendleby this morning to head out to the first summit along the station tracks.Hugh had a plan to drive another track to save some walking but unfortunately one creek crossing was washed out and too deep to get across so we set out from the same place as last year. This is a hard hike with lots of smaller hills and gullies to make it hard to head straight to the summit.

Sheering quarters holiday cabins at Bendleby Range property the owners kindly let us 4 wheel drive on their tracks for no charge. We gave my Colorado a run today, tracks are easy going nothing to hard except one creek crossing that stopped us.

Hugh with his trusty GPS setting the pace again .

After many smaller hills and gullies the trig point is in sight it took us nearly 2 hours to hike about 4 km so it’s pretty hard going.

Finally though we made it to this old trip point the wind was strong but nice and cool with full cloud cover helping to keep the flies away.

Hugh hard at work trying to find a chaser who were a bit slow to start with but we finally got some contacts on 80 and 40 to both qualify. I was able to give the KX2 a run on cw this time and I must say it is great.

On the way back to the Ute we made a different path making it shorter back to the flat lands the hiked along a fence line on the track we could not access . It proved if we could drive that track to the end the summit is about half the walk but still hard slog.

After lunch we headed to Eke Hill on the southern side of the property so we had to drive about 30 km of more tracks to get there. I only engaged 4 x 4 for a short while on a rough section near the parking spot.

I always enjoy this part of the hike to Eke Hill up to the top of this water way is about half way.

Looking back from where we started we are now on the shelf above the water way.

Amazing views to the south.

and the north

Hugh working the pile up on 40m

I got to work some cw and ssb today. Good conditions on 40m with lots of chasers.

Good bye to Eke Hill until next time

Thanks to the chasers and the Luckcraft Family for the use of their tracks and hills.

Thanks to Hugh for more ground work following up permission and access .

Thanks for reading

Ian

CZ e e