It’s been a long time ago since our last trail report due to someone (me…) making a mistake regarding our website, causing it to be offline for several weeks. But now we’re back, and to celebrate, I’m posting another trail report. This week’s run was in Glenbrook, which has suffered a bit from some recent floods, but was now accessible again.
Glenbrook is a small town with around 5000 inhabitants, and is located around 70km west of Sydney. This makes Glenbrook one of the closest towns in the Blue Mountains National Park. Besides being close by, Glenbrook is also a tourists’ delight. Providing ample opportunities to satisfy the inner coffee cravings or just strolling around town to buy your favorite local produce. Combined with some great walking tracks, Glenbrook is a perfect destination for an easy day trip.
And while we love to walk, we love running even more. This week, it was time for Bennetts Trail Ridge (10km), which is a slightly shorter version of the Bennetts Trail Loop (14km). The trail starts at the Ironbarks Picnic Area where the Oaks Trails (a fire trail) quickly brings you to the slightly hidden Oaks Singles Track. The Oaks Singles Track is a track which is quite popular with mountainbike riders. They are often polite enough to not race you off your socks, but there are exceptions, so be careful.
(Speaking of socks, I was running in my new Sub4 compression socks, of which I’ll put a review up shortly. I normally run in short socks. However, due to the branches scratching my legs on most runs, I thought I’d try something different. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but these socks are not a bad choice!)
After 2 kilometers on the flat Oaks Singles track, the track went left, and turned into an easy accessible fire trail. No view, no inclines, just straight running. This is fine for a while, but gets a bit mundane after a few kilometers. Luckily, after another 5 kilometer, the track turned into a single track again with stairs, which I often enjoy running. The stairs ended at Euroka Clearing, which is a nice and simple campsite with lots of lush greens around it. The campgrounds havea creek running straight through it. Surprisingly, there were not many visitors today, which gave me the opportunity to take the run straight over the fields.
The last part of the trail was mostly concrete roads, but the steep incline made this quite the challenge. After also conquering this part of the track, a small bit of firetrail brought me back to our starting position. Here I enjoyed a post run snack consisting of a few energy bars.
Upon completion of the track, we decided to tourist Glenbrook ourselves a bit. Here we enjoyed a well deserved lunch at one of the local cafes. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo, I was probably too hungry. Glenbrook, we’ll meet again!
