Wild Dog Hill

Look out for falling white men...

Looks like a long way up from here..but it's not much over 70 yards up.

James risking his life for a picture....

Flat as far as the eye can see..great sunsets from here.

Spot the Kangaroo, she spotted us way before we saw her.




Wild Dog Hill is about ten miles out of town and being one of just a few hills here on the saltbush plains, it gets a few picnickers, bush walkers and rock climbers.
It’s named after an Aboriginal dreamtime story of lost love and a nasty death; as such it’s a sacred site. This doesn’t mean we can’t go there, just that we have to treat the area with due respect.
I have a friend raised in a large city surrounded by mountains…she came…she saw…she did not see why we bother going there at all.
But in these flat lands, it’s like… “Look, a hill… W O W!”
In case you’re wondering…No, we’re not hicks, but we do share a weird sense of humor… Out here you have to take your fun where you find it…or is it just me?!

It’s not much of a hill by world standards, and not much of a park...but way out here…well, it’s the best we’ve got.

Do you see the pic with the red triangle? Click to enlarge it and you might be able to see the female Kangaroo watching us from the safety of the bush. (Did you ever wonder why they’re that color?) This is their country and they can move up and down these slopes with ease, you don’t have any chance of catching them here. (As if you’d want to…) We’ve had a reasonable amount of rain recently after several years of drought so this is actually very green for here, every female Roo is carrying young and the bush is as green and lush as I’ve seen it.
The loony risking his life for a good picture is son-in-law James, he’s done some free climbing so immediately saw the site as being full of potential and proceeded to freak my daughter right out by scaling the face. Behind him is typical of our saltbush plains, low Saltbush and Bluebush with stands of Myall trees many hundreds of years old.
My daughter, son-in-law, their four kids and I were led here today by my GPS which promises a Geocache site somewhere hereabouts.
The half hour walk to the top is pretty easy nowadays, there's a rough built staircase up the side of the hill, instead of the precipice that preceded it. I’m hoping for an escalator soon…
The view from the top is pretty good …miles of Saltbush plains with the occasional hill, not that the kids cared at all, all they want is to find the ‘treasure’.
The GPS dragged us along a narrow trail then off the side of the hill and into a rocky escarpment. (Ok, fifty rocks from large dog to bowling ball size)
Once we located the immediate area we started looking in and around the many rocks and bushes, with kids going in every direction. (imagine a running race for blind people with no sense of direction) Despite the Geocache rules about not putting caches under heavy rocks, the kids were immediately trying hard to lift rocks larger than themselves. James found the cache hidden in a crevice under a rock, a matt black and green painted lunchbox with the usual log and collection of trinkets inside.
Log filled in, trinkets swapped and back down the hill for coffee before the drive home.
I did kinda stuff up though, after finding the cache I turned off my GPS…if I’d left it on it would have told me about the two caches hidden along the road on the way home.

Oops!