Final days on the Gordon River: Packrafting the Franklin River, Tasmania.

All good things come to an end. We are treated to a spectactular canyon to explore and a day of lolling about taking our time to arrive at the jetty on the Gordon river.
The waterfall is a popular place to visit by day tourists and kayakers coming upstream from Strahan. We stayed at a cabin not far downstream. The cabin was well worth visiting and it had bunks to sleep on. Inside there is has paddling memorabilia and many articles about the Franklin dam protests as well as stories about gnarly incidents on the river. All of the stories made for fascinating reading, engaging my attention for quite some time.
The old paddles and rafts are quite a contrast to a sleek well engineered craft today. It is amazing what they got away with in those days. To think that the '80s were modern times to us my generation.
The next morning at 6:00am, we used a yacht service at 6:00am to take us to Strahan.
It is about 70km on open water, so paddling it in the packraft was out of the question.
We had a stopover at the old theatre in Queenstown, to get short showing of the Franklin protests and the theatre's history. Queenstown also has an extensive mountain bike park which looks interesting.
Sad to leave, elated to have had the opportunity to visit this very special place.
Blog Indexes:
For an interactive map see:

Comments

Post a Comment