Missed new years eve for the first time ever - lucky one of our camping mates had his car alarm go of at 3am in the morning while camped out bush at
Talbotville and we had an excuse to wake him up early with some crackers otherwise we'd have
have had to take everything
home unused.
Our friends and friends of friends collected to-gether for Xmas holidays near
Dargo in Victoria and soon had up to a dozen cars, 20 tents and I'm not sure how many bikes.
This Motley collection had enough incidents and stories to talk about for the whole of 2008 however some didn't seem like fun at the time.
One trip we did was going quite
well until we got to a moderate
river crossing near Kinswell
bridge. We lead across and the water was fun depth at under a metre, only just breaching the bonnet once. However the cruiser behind us slipped sideways backend
first and got hung up some rocks. They began taking on water faster than you would think, we reckon they probably had 10 minutes till loss of car.
Watching from the bank I could see there front wheels spinning, and radioed same.
Sure enough they had accidently entered the crossing in 2 wheel drive.
My son jumped in and put the hubs in while they were
well under water, The car then lurched forward causing him to jump and strain his recently set broken shoulder.
Later the car was stripped and left out to dry, during which time it was noted that a major floor bung was missing which explained the water intake.
So the next day I organized a trailbike ride starting from Collingwood spur, this took my mind off an eye tooth which must have seen to much Xmas pudding and was starting to hurt.
We waiting for the gang to collect but two had not shown up and just as we started to search a rider came rushing up saying that his partners bike had gone over the edge of McMillan road right where there was a sheer drop off. Fortunately the bike had thrown the rider as it went over and she was not significantly injured.
So we take off to the scene and found a still shaken rider and the bike wedged some 50ft over the edge. The road here is made by just bulldozing dirt out to form an edge and its to steep to compact and just attempting to get to the bike caused
rocks to tumble down as
well. It was quite a bad position so we rode off to get my car for a winch rescue and left others to close the road and direct traffic.
Half an hour later I was back and in position to winch the bike up but others had gone down in an attempt to clear a path for the bike to come up. It was a somewhat disorganized scene with some over enthusiastic helpers in quite a bad spot.
One of our riders was at the bike and in attempting to move a
rock slipped on the sheer rockface and did a full downhill somersault landing full on his back several meters below. I just saw the end of it and heard the sickening thud
but as luck would have it his family had brought him a top of the range bikers bubble suit which had a full length back protector in it.
This saved his back as he hit hard but his unprotected arm followed striking a
rock square on. The rider knew instantly his wrist bleep tered and all of a sudden a bad situation got significantly worse.
I and a friend jumped in at this point, sliding down to the hurt rider.
But under the direct sunlight against the rockface, heavily clothed and in significant pain the rider was fainting in and out and maybe worse.
It was hard for us to do much more than provide shade at first and while we tried to figure a way out, the rider grabbed my dangling winch rope in his unbroken left hand and began to pull himself up knowing that he had only a few minutes before he became a dead weight. With two of us pushing from below
and holding him each time to enable him to re-grab the rope he edged up.
Fortunately it was synthetic rope and we wrapped it around his arm to make it grab and despite a couple of setbacks we soon had him laid in my Patrols front
seat. With a strength I'm sure I couldn't muster he commanded us to pull off his motorbike arm over the broken wrist and other minor injuries before fainting again.
High up on the mountain side we had good radio contact to the
Talbotville camp ground below and I had forewarned a nurse with our group when getting my car.
She provided a cool head and simple clear instructions to us while we made a sling and braced the arm with a rolled up 4X4 magazine .
In a surprise we had Next-G phone contact from the
campground
whereas my CDMA would not work. A few calls by the nurse established that it was about 150km east to the nearest hospital, but the
campground was about 1/2 hours drive in the other direction.
Two options to choose from! I thought about this for a while and decided it would be better to take it easy, reduce everybodys stress levels and stabilize the situation under shade at
our camp rather than go immediately to hospital.
So we drove as carefully as we could from near Bulltown spur down to the valley floor, sending a rider ahead to warn traffic as its just to narrow to pass on some sections of this road.
We delivered the injured helper to the nurse and his rather stressed wife and tried to calmly figure out where to go from here.
We still had a badly shaken rider up on the pass and the bike that had gone over the edge was still there and visible for at least a kilometer.
Others people not-involved were reporting it on the UHF as for all they knew it was an un-resolved accident scene.
While others re-configured my car as a ambulance and reset the arm using a chainsaw cover as a splint, we took another Patrol back to the scene and slowly winched the bike back up to the road. This was not easy by itself and to accomplish this we attached the winch rope to the bikes back wheel and dragged it up backwards with two others holding onto each side of the handle bar which stabilized the bike as my son operated the winch dragged the bike and the helpers up all to-gether.
The bike was found to be rideable back to base, but the female rider was to shaken to do it so my son rode it, taking care to not further agitate his collar bone injury.
None of the rest of the injured family would drive the road out of the steep valley so we began an eight hour return trip to Bairnsdale hospital arriving back to our tent at 2am the next day.
The above events left us with an interesting situation. The family had a vehicle they wouldn't/couldn't drive out of the valley so next day there was nothing for it but to drive it out to the
Dargo high plains road where they could take over.
Finally at mid-day we said goodbye to them and started back down to
Talbotville for a much needed quiet afternoon.
We had got about 10km before radio calls made it clear that their car had problems.
So myself and another member of this site drove back to baby sit the car and followed it across the high plains to the bitumen at Mt Hotham. It appears that the rough 4wd sections and corrugations had loosened an exhaust baffle and this intermittently clogged the exhaust shutting down the engine.
Once on bitumen, it seemed ok so we nicked sideways a bit and got some seriously needed cappicino's at Mt Hotham Chalet.
Late that afternoon we headed back to
camp passing the turn-off to Mt Blue Rag on the way.
Couldn't resist the temptation so we did a quick trip up this Iconic 4wd track with its spectacular open
rock climb to
the summit and watched the sun setting.
The various vehicle and family arrangements meant that we had to pack up and leave
camp the next day taking extra passengers.
The injured party had been transferred to a different hospital and had his arm/wrist reset and was reportedly doing relatively
well.
By the time we were settled back in
Melbourne it was New years eve.
My tooth was now really hurting, and so we found and emergency dentist and began a root canal treatment. On getting
home I fell straight into bed and that is how I stuffed up our New years eve.
Robin Miller