Do you have to do 'The Sacrifice' to go to Desert Highlands?

[notebene.3190]

Is there another path to go into that zone to the north? I happen to be on that story step, but looking at what I'd need to do to complete one of the achievements, it suggests getting the Springer before doing it. Does that mean I'll basically have to do that story step again if I want the achievement (which, is fine, I guess, I can think of many other times in HoT and LW3 where achievements were basically mutually exclusive)?

 

Edit: I went ahead and did the story step, and realized what I was concerned about was 'after' the instanced area anyways. So never mind. How do you delete a post? :)