#2: [13-Dec-12]

04-Oct-2001 -- The day before, my wife, Grace and I had to drive to Townsville to pick up my brother Reg who had flown in from his job at the delightfully named town of Gunpowder, so we decided to knock over a confluence on the trip back to my place. It's Reg's first and he was quite happy to learn how to use a GPS and navigate for us.

Heading north from Townsville we turned left on the road to Paluma and discovered a lovely windy road that went through rainforest and topped out at 975 metres. I took a photo of a lovely bridge built with depression labour in 1932 over Little Crystal Creek.

After following the road for a few more kms, bitumen gave way to our familiar gravel and dirt roads. We went past the nicely named town of Hidden Valley and saw a huge mass of tents. After a bit of wondering the penny dropped and it had to be the American TV crew who were filming the survivor show or whatever it's called. The confluence was only a few kilometres from the tent city so if anyone there is switched on to confluence hunting maybe they have beaten us to this, else they're welcome to inspect the flag we left.

We were lucky enough to find a rough track that took us from 1300m to 320m and then had a downhill walk to the point, where we planted our flag and took the photos.

The altimeter read 642 metres and we had found our target not long after 08:00, time to head home on more dirt roads before we could strike bitumen. All up we travelled 500km and got home quite weary.