The Pajero 4 wheel drive club had now removed an unsightly dumped vehicle wreck from the Bush , even if it was in the face of adversity after having to make numerous phone calls for permission and after filling out more paper work than you could believe to get a permit to run an event .
It had proved to be a good learning exercise and not a lot of hard work . Thanks to the occupants of all six vehicles for coming along and a special thanks to Dirk for making available his trailer .
We headed now to the Marysville oval where we had lunch under the shelter there . After lunch we went for an exploratory type of drive to check out a few tracks , but they were all pretty greasy and it was very disappointing to see the carnage caused by the local dozer driver in his efforts to ‘ improve ’ tracks . One track which had a few small bogs in it has now had these huge bypasses enlarged by the dozer and logs and debris pushed into a pile to half-heartedly cover the bogs . It really looked crappy to say the least and if they had just filled the bogs in a bit it would have looked a 1000 % better than it does now . Never let it be said that its 4-wheel drivers who bugger the bush . Every track doesn ’ t need to be turned into a highway and everything that ’ s not a highway doesn ’ t need to be closed . We passed several tracks with mounds of dirt in front of them and little white A4 sheets of paper stating basically that ‘ closed forever ’ was their fate for an assortment of reasons from ‘ erosion hazard ’, ‘ revegetation ’ or ‘ public safety ’. It really is quite sad to see what ’ s happening to our bush track network . I guess next time there is a major fire or emergency they may need some of these closed tracks and regret the day they closed them .
Time to head to our campsite for the night , Valley Farm at Narbethong . We arrived there in time to set up the tents in daylight and then have a brief play on the obstacles . Shane was there when we arrived , and he had a nice fire going for us to get warm by . Dirk had already left , and Karen departed to have tea at the pub with Kim Cole who had come up to stay overnight in readiness for the driver training course to be held on Sunday .
After we had all had our dinners and sat around the campfire telling tales tall and true of past exploits and solving the environmental problems of the bush we went to bed . In the morning it was breakfast time around the shelter again and time to plan the days driving for the 4 remaining trip participants . Everybody was keen for a drive , but once Rob surfaced , he was not well and announced he was going to head straight home . The others were all finishing off breakfast when we were asked to be stand in ‘ trainees ’ for a while as some of the official trainees had not arrived . They were holding D . T . assessment of instructors , so this sounded fun . We all got to be first timers while we were trained in the best way to tackle the obstacles by our instructors . Once we had finished with that , we headed off to do our drive . We were now down to the 3 Nissans ( I will loosely define my Maverick as a Nissan ) and my plan was to do the hardest hill in section one of this year ’ s challenge . We knew the tracks were wet , so we found our way around to it via part of