Lake Myrtle to Chapter Lake

[dopplershift]

Hi all,

Hope I'm staying within the forum rules here...

We're planning a trip from WoJ to Lake Myrtle and thence to plateau of Cathedral Mt, before further adventures in the Du Cane range area.

For Lake Myrtle to Chapter Lake, my current plan was to head North from Lake Myrtle along the Jackson Creek track and at some point cut across West towards Chapter Lake. Likely just South of Lake Bill. Looking at the satellite imagery and 25k map, this seems plausible and I've penciled in a route.

However, when I looked at my GPS (Garmin) it's showing a marked track connecting the Jackson Creek track to the Moses Creek Track. The GPS shows this leaving the Jackson Creek track at Lake Myrtle, heading West and then turning North West after skirting the rise directly North of the lake. Does anyone know if this is a "real" track or pad? If so, this could be an option for us to reduce the amount of bush bashing we have to do. I can't find any reference to this track on any other maps/imagery so perhaps whoever made Garmin's maps simply hallucinated it??

[headwerkn]

The Jackson and Moses Creek Tracks split off at the Walker Rego 'hut' about half a km in, south of the main trail head Moses Creek Carpark. There's a short suspension bridge there.

Both tracks are 'real', more like well worn pads than official tracks. The Jackson Creek Track isn't shown on ListMap, so I'm guessing it isn't official. But it was perfectly navigable about six years ago when I last used it, save for a couple of slightly vague parts.

Could you manageably off-track between the two tracks? Probably. Should you? Hmmm.. WoJ is a pretty sensitive and heavily visited area. For the sake of saving an extra 1-2km of pretty straightforward walking, might be worth sticking to the existing routes wherever possible.

[JamesMc]

These tracks are in the Chapman / Siseman Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair guidebook. There's nothing secret about them.

[dopplershift]

Thanks both for your replies.

I feel pretty stupid about this... as you've both pointed out, the track I was asking about is definitely the Jackson Creek track. I have the Chapman book, but this track is not shown on any of the maps (in my edition) and there is only one tiny reference to it in the notes for the Lake Myrtle track. The tracks on the GPS aren't labelled at all and because the Lake Myrtle track actually runs along Jackson Creek for some way, I wrongly identified the Lake Myrtle track as the Jackson Creek track. LISTmap has it clearly labelled though, I just hadn't zoomed in far enough. Doh!

With reference to cutting across off track, I agree that it's not worth it to save a km or two and sticking to existing tracks helps limit our impact on the beautiful environment we're there to experience. I was thinking it would save us more like 11km (taking the Lake Myrtle track all the way to Mersey Forrest Rd, walking along the road, then taking the Moses Creek track to Chapter Lake). Anyway, thanks again for your help!

[north-north-west]

Jacksons Creek Track to the junction and then Moses Creek Track is about 2km less than the cross-country route and a lot less damaging; there's some very sensitive ground between the two on the straight line. Biggest difference is the altitude loss and regain.