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This is my first walk report as I've not really been hillwalking for long and I thought that my first one would be my first munro but here I am in a place called Halls gap, it's about 4 hours drive inland from Melbourne and is surrounded by mountains. I've been in Oz for 5 weeks now and iv done a lot of walking but it's been around the cities so I was looking forward to this.
The one mountain that everyone comes here to do is called the Pinnacle but I thought I would ease into the surroundings by doing a smaller hill. My German room mate at the hostel came with me to walk Boronia peak and we set off at 10.30. You could tell that it was going to be a hot day but at that time of the morning it was fine, I had on sun cream and a big bottle of water with me. We walked parallel to stoney creek for about 2k and then the road forked, straight on to the visitor centre and upwards to the peak.
Bettina my room mate took the lead and she set quite a good pace, we came to a gap in the trees where you can see the scenery open up and the mountains that surround the village of Halls gap.
The well know summit of the Pinnacle is one of the ones above but I'm not sure which one, anyway onwards and upwards. Bettina was still setting the pace and I was keeping up fine with her, about 20 minutes after the last photo was taken it looked like we had nearly reached the summit
but the path kept on going so we followed it until I looked around and noticed a higher summit quite close, this was obviously our summit ahead of us.
We were walking up the path when Bettina shouted "snake", it was a red bellied snake that is quite venomous but it slithered away and we live to continue our hike
. After that encounter I kept on hearing things rustling in the bush and sometimes you could tell that whatever it was was massive, the best thing is to carry on walking as they will probably run away from me as fast as I'll run away from them.
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- This was not the snake we saw but there were a lot of these little lizards
After about an hour we reached what again we thought was the summit only for it to be another false summit
We could see the real summit and it looked fearsome.
By this time of day the sun was beating down, my cheeks were on fire and I was sweating quite a lot. Bettina was fine though and putting me to shame. I was ready to give up at this point, there were no views as there was so much trees, it was hot and stifling. Bettina went on ahead and did a little scrambling when she shouted back that the view was amazing so I pushed myself on and she was not wrong. At this point there was a bit of wind that I loved and Bettina did not, she had to put on her jumper. We stayed there for a minute and pushed on the final 20 meters to the trig point. I think the photos tell the rest of the story so I hope you enjoy them.
