Day 24 – Archer River Roadhouse to Cooktown (451k)

There wa a heavy dew on the ground overnight and we left Archer River early in cool still conditions. As we had a long day ahead of us we had decided to skip breakfast at the Archer River Roadhouse and head to Coen for breakfast at “Grunters Beastro” where they had good coffee.

Once we neared Coen we were in hilly wooded country again and we travelled through this all the way south to Musgrave where we refuelled. Up to this point we had been retracing the route we had taken north, but at Musgrave we turned east and headed into the Lakefield National Park on our way to Cooktown.

It was not long before we were out of the wooded hills and onto the grassed river delta country all of which was very dry. After a couple of river crossings we stopped at Lakefield for a quick lunch, thanks to Les. We then continued across this flat land until we reached the turnoff at Old Laura where we turned onto Battle Camp Road and the country changed. Now we found ourselves in undulating heavily wooded country with many water crossings, a couple of which were quite deep. We managed to cross them all without incident. The road was now a red clay and gravel and quite tricky as we climbed and descended down the side of steep hills with most of the bends being off camber to add to the required concentration levels. After the turnoff onto the Hopevale Road we found ourselves in lush farm country with fat beef cattle which we continued to ride through until we got to the outskirts of Cooktown.

We checked into our nightfall the River of Gold Motel late afternoon and prepared ourselves for the final day of our adventure with rain forecast for the first time.