2020 The Great North Walk

Day -24 The Great North Walk-Logistics
Food calculations
Food calculations

By now most of you will be aware my new long distance trail for 2020 is the Great North Walk from Newcastle to Sydney at a distance of around 260 km. Personally I find hikes of this length strange. They are longer than ‘normal’ requiring longish days, day after day, but they don’t have the logistical impacts of hikes over 500 km. This change in hikes has meant all my logistical requirements ranging from travel to and from the walk, start and finish points, food carries, and daily distances travelled all have to be recalculated.

Given campers in NSW are still required to fill out a trip intention form due to COVID, it means that unlike my long distance trips I am less likely to ‘wing it’ and will stick to my planned distances making for a very cruisey trip at least from my perspective. Two differences that have come up on this hike is that given I will be averaging 23km per day, I won’t take any rest days on my planned 11 day hike. On my long distance hikes where I average 32km per day, I will take a rest day every 6-8 days. The second issue is that as I need 10 days of food, I will carry everything rather than doing a food drop along the way. Usually I carry a maximum of 8 days of food between resupply. This may sound a lot but that will work out between 6-6.5-7 kg (dried) food for the whole trip with some meals purchased along the way to make up the rest.

One other bonus on this trip from a logistical perspective is that I don’t need to worry about travelling interstate, from a biosecurity perspective, which means I can dry some of my own snacks which its now one of my jobs over the next few weeks leading up to the start of the trip.

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By now most of you will be aware my new long distance trail for 2020 is the Great North Walk from Newcastle to Sydney at a distance of around 260 km. Personally I find hikes of this length strange. They are longer than ‘normal’ requiring longish days, day after day, but they don’t have the […]