Easter Weekend - Hill End - Sofala

Easter Weekend 29th of March to the 1st of April 2013:

The Royal Hotel at Hill End

Hill End, a gold mining town of the 1900's. Three friends and I decided to head to Hill End and Sofala for a camping weekend over Easter. We left Sydney on Friday morning and we were at Hill End just after lunchtime. We setup camp after investigating the two paid town camp grounds choosing the Town Camp ground over the bush orientated ground. Both were almost full by the time we got there. We would have camped along the Turon River down the Bridle Track but not all our cars would have made it down due to clearance issues.

Hill End is a heritage site and maintained by National Parks.

A lone heritage building in the setting sun

Hosies Bed Breakfast at Hill End

 

Weeping Willow with a lone bench as the sunset.

 

We spent Friday afternoon setting up tents, collecting and cutting up fallen trees for firewood along the Bridle Track, a little site seeing around Hill End and a then Beer at the pub. We tried to get a few beers to go but apparently not available on Good Friday.....who new? We spent Saturday Gold Panning down on the Turon River finding a few specks proving there is still a gold for the casual fossicker with a some work. We all had pans, showels, small picks etc at our disposal. We also had two home made hand crevicing pumps and a home made sluice. We were all quite sore at the end.

Sofala main street and a Nissan CUBE (there seemed to be a lot of these in the area.)

Sunday, we headed towards Sofala and stopped at a creek along the way. We did a little panning but we were suffering from the day before and were a less energetic.  A few more gold specks were found and then we packed it in and headed for sight seeing at Sofala. While we were finding the spot a dog ran off from its owners we tried to stop it further up the road but it ran in another direction. We told the owners but they returned multiple times during the day asking if we had seen at all again during the day. We don't know if it was found. The owners were from Canberra so maybe the dog was trying to find its way back?

Sofala with looming dark clouds

St Pauls in the morning at Hill End

 We headed back early on Monday to miss traffic returning to Sydney.