Grampions hiking

This last week was spent concurring the Grampions with Tim and Eric who are from France.  We started out our conquest on Monday with an assault on Mt. Stapylton which is a small mountain north of the olive grove.

The mountain has a track that leads up to the summit, but it is still a strenuous and worth while especially for the view.  The track starts out over the rocks from the Mount Zero car park and is very easy to follow thanks to the yellow arrows that are painted along the rout.  After reaching the first ridge we followed a typical trail down into the valley and up the other side, here we left the trail though to follow are own path up the cliffs and boulders to the summit.  It was a lot of fun scrambling up and jumping from boulder to boulder until we again made it to the path leading up to the summit.

On the final approach we discovered a very large cave set in the side of the path.  It was a cave large enough to use as a garage although only about five and a half feet tall at the tallest.  It was made of sand stone and appeared to be made by the wind swirling through and removing the sand bit by bit.  The wind had also made some very unusual holes in the ceiling that worked perfectly as climbing holds.  The holds were pretty tenuous which meant we couldn't trust our weight on all of them, but still had some fun swinging in the entrance.  After a short time playing in the cave we continued up to the summit of Mt. Stapylton and were amazed by the view we saw.  Out side of the Grampions and a few other mountains, this region of Australia is almost perfectly flat and allows you an uninterrupted view until the curve of the earth comes into effect.
After our Monday excursion to the top of Mt. Stapylton we decided to make Tuesday an adventure as well.  This time we attempted to climb the steep hill side behind the Laharum Grove called the Mt. Difficult Range.  We wanted to make it to the top in time to see the sunset so we departed the Baum house at 7:30pm and began our bush-walk up.  This was a much more challenging climb since there were no trails up this section and the undergrowth was thigh high and thick in some places.  The other hazard we had to contend with while climbing was spiders.  There were spiders webs between every large opening it seems and most of these spiders were big creepy guys with webs that were quite strong.  They were such a hazard that I had dreams about them that night when I went to sleep.  I dreamed that there were tons of spiders webs above my bed and even woke up at one point waving my hand in the air trying to clear them away. It was a somewhat stressful sleep I can tell you.
After about an hour of struggling through the bush and some directional errors we made the top of the ridge and were finally free of the underbrush as we scrambled on the rocks.  We hadn't made it to the very tip top of the ridge yet so we had to continue on hopping from pillar to pillar and some points and scrambling down steep valleys and up the other sides.  As we approached the summit Tim and I found a small cave that ran through the rock.  It was about 24ft. long and and entrance that was just large enough for us to squeeze through.  We were scared that there would be snakes or spiders in the cave, so I crawled in very slowly, investigating every nook with my head lamp as I went.  It was a some what tight cave, but quite nice and fun to explore and when we finally exited it was to a beautiful red sunset below us.  It was a lot of fun getting to the top of the Mt. Difficult Range behind the Baum house, but the climb down was what made it a real adventure.
With the sunset finishing up we quickly headed back down the hill.  Taking less care with our path than on the way up we fell into quite a few spider webs, but we didn't care as the light was quickly fading and we only had two headlamps for three people.  We lost the light completely as we approached the half way point and had to continue with the two headlamps available.  Unfortunately Tim's headlamp began to flicker soon after we turned it on and we finished the last half mile of hiking with only the light of my headlamp to guide all three of us down a cliff face and through the brush back into the safety of the the  olive grove.

View from inside the cave

The flat landscape of Australia

Tim and Eric enjoying the drop