Rachel Grindlay

After taking a couple of days to get ourselves from Sydney to Mt Buffalo it was time for some bushwalking!

Turns out Sunday morning is not the best time to be driving up the mountain – plenty of cyclists and blind corners to contend with. Despite good intentions of getting to Mt Buffalo by 9am it was after 10am when we left the car.

Our first day loop was about as unprepared as we’d ever been for a walk. Armed with the Parks map and a route I found from someone’s blog off we went. Not having a topo map we didn’t know how much up & down was in the route, or even how long our intended plan was. Our lack of fitness became apparent quickly – though I choose to blame the altitude… I wasn’t complaining about the altitude with respect to the temperature though – a nice change from the steamy humidity we’d had in Sydney for most of summer.

The GPS put our loop for the day at 21km. The most we’ve done in a day in… I’m not sure how long. I was very happy to make use of the hot showers at Lake Catani campground (make sure you book ahead) and get into warm clothes. The evening was fairly chilly.

The next day we walked from the campground to the Chalwell Galleries – which is just a 50m section of ‘canyon’. Given how little canyoning we’ve been able to do this summer we enjoyed it – even if granite doesn’t given you the same kind of grip that sandstone does.

Returning to camp via a circuit of Lake Catani we packed up, drove the car to the day use area and then walked to the Gorge area of the park. Had we hung around there for another hour we would have been able to watch 60+ paragliders launch – as it was we saw them taking to the skies from View Point.

We stopped at Eurobin Falls in our way our and walked up to the Upper Falls. The crowds had departed from Lady Bath Falls by the time we returned so Tom managed to get a couple of photos.

Finally we headed to Mount Beauty for the night. The next day we had an easy day and did the Mount Beauty Gorge Walk – though I suspect we went a bit further up the gorge compared to most people!

The next part of our trip was out of Falls Creek – read about it here.