We’re in Wilpena Pound, the heart of the Flinders Ranges, and once again my booking.com genius has done it again – last minute vacancies. A cosy quiet little collection of huts – similar to motel rooms with a fancy part and a more basic part. The fancy part is resort-like with all the trimmings, while we go to the IGA.

But it works. We just leave our room, walk to a space 100 metres away and choose from two trails. The next day the hiker walks along one of those trails and after a few kilometres can branch off into trails where once again there are more choices. Other meeting spaces have similar options available, whilst some require a short drive of 15-30 minute.. 

Today we completed two of those walks   Mt Bagge was the first. I’ll say firstly that the area is dominated by high tussocky hills surrounded by mountains that are of a burnt orange colour, with these mountain boulders large and small scattered all around. Jumping rocks and dodging spiky bushes led us to the mountain’s base where we started climbing a quite difficult path which wound its way up an ever more steeper pathway which you could sometimes only identify by the yellow markers.

We were crawling at times, looking for different routes at others, and looking ever upwards to see what the track was doing. The vegetation hadn’t changed, just the slope. We nearly reached the top but at one stage I felt a familiar dizziness and a little shaky. I reached out to hold myself steady, but was okay. After resting I came to a section that was almost vertical, that I normally would have climbed although with some difficulty. But we decided very close to the top that we didn’t need to reach it.

I don’t get dizzy on the way down so I could be quite relaxed with my rock jumping. A quick lunch on a rock and a walk home to make more accommodation bookings, and an afternoon stroll along the magnificent red river gum creek. This was a little more relaxing than our morning climb – a walk to an ancient homestead past a family of wild goats and an echidna. However there was an outlook about a km up, and even though it was steep it was fairly easy because it had stairs. We left the Wangara hill on a quick walk home, where Corrie soon had us a guaranteed bed for two more nights. I’ve noted that we have many more mountains to climb.