Australia

Mount Difficult, Grampians, Victoria

Character: A long exposed walk but with a number of contrasting environments

Ascent: ~2200 feet

Time: 6 hours

Map: I found a 1:25,000 map of the Grampians National Park, but do not have a reference for it. This walk is over awkward terrain, and although there are tracks, it would be possible to get lost. Up here somone might not find you for 48 hours, and that 48 hours might be without water. You need to be self reliant, and a good map would be essential.

Transport: Car - may be local buses, not investigated. This is quite a remote part of the northern end of the national park

Sources: "Northern Walks, Grampians National Park", published by Parks Victoria and available from any of their offices (eg at Halls Gap)

Accomodation: Halls Gap Youth Hostel: (03) 5356 4544

I undertook this walk in early March 2006, just after some of the worst bushfires ever to hit the park occurred. Technically the track may have been closed, but the signs were ambiguous, saying Wonderland (another area of the Grampians) was closed, and not this northern stretch, so I undertook it anyway!

The walk starts from the Roses Gap road, at Troopers Creek campground. This is quite a remote part of the national park, and care should be taken that you have informed someone of your plans and your estimated return time. I saw no water on the walk until 5 hours into it, and not a single other person. The summit plateau is very exposed and I found myself almost suffering with heat stroke and some disorientation, and was glad to have a good map, and even resorted to my GPS at one stage to confirm exactly where I was (and I was going the wrong way!). The plateau is wide and knolly in places, so what may seem like the obvious downhill gradient your map is telling you to expect, may be just the slope down a small knoll leading in the wrong direction. Be careful!

Just a few hundred metres after leaving the car park you come to an interesting rock formation. It is possible to walk all around this and it is obviously a point of interest for many of the walkers and climbers who come this way. Shortly after this the up-until-now flat track starts to climb more steeply and around 1 km after leaving the car park there is some easy scrambling up small rock faces to a more level section which you will follow for around a kilometre (though it feels much longer) as you head north under the escarpment of Mount Difficult on your righthand side. Interestingly, unlike the other Grampains peaks, particularly in the south of the park, here the steeper side of the range is its eastern side, and the typical cuesta landforms seen in the south are not obvious here.

The long northern traverse under this escarpment is interesting. There is some tree canopy shade, though an early start is recommended. You boulder hop and go through some interestng little gorges where the rocks have piled up against this flank of the mountain. Nothing too difficult, but you want to keep your concentration as the ground is never smooth.

Eventually the slopes on your right relent, and a breach in the battlements of the scarp is reached (after one or two false positives). The track scrambles up this and then soons turns back to the north over the knolly ground mentioned before. It really is almost a lunar landscape, with everything on a small scale. Is this slope in front of me this point on the map? No! Its just another little knoll on the lumpy ridge!

Some 500 metres or so after gaining the ridge, you are in a hollow with various signs and indications of camping. I missed the sign that indicates the summit of Mount Difficult, but none-the-less it is clear that there is a rocky summit to your left and that you can head up this any number of ways. The summit itself has a tripod like structure on it - I am not quite sure what these are - just a triangulation point? - not quite the same as the stone or concrete ones I am used to in the UK.

Below are some of the views from the summit.

Summit looking roughly north

Lake Wartook (reservoir), SSE

 View NW

From the summit, retrace your steps down to the foot of the summit rocks. Continue north on the obvious track. The bush is now quite open and you are quite exposed as you move from one tilted rock pavement, via some intervening sand, onto the next tilted rock pavement. This is all fairly level, though it starts to descend slightly more after a couple of kilometres, as it veers more to the north east. It was at about this point that I got quite disorientated. A track headed off to the right and somehow I found myself on this until my compass told me I was going in completely the wrong direction, and the GPS confirmed the same thing. Returning to the north, I found where the track split again, and navigated through a small decline and then a small pull up onto the western escarpment edge again. This track is really quite indistinct, and I would advise careful route finding at this point. Once the escarpment is again reached after leaving it some two to three hours previously, the route is clearer again, first heading SW down quite steep slopes, then more to the west and eventually north as the path flattens almost completely. Again you have no canopy above you, as for the last three or so hours, and the sun exposure in what is likely to be the middle of the day is extreme.

Escarpment wall at the start of the descent

As mentioned above, the walk has levelled at this stage, but in fact you still have quite some descent to go as you are still 500 metres up the mountain. The descent occurs in a hot cauldron facing the sunny north and is quite unpleasantly steep with loose ground underfoot. I was really getting quite tired at this stage and wondering if I had bitten off more than I could chew. Although it was the beginning of March, the temperature was up in the high 30's with a desicating dryness to the air.

Eventually you come down into the damp corner that is Beehive Falls. This was flowing so slowly on that day that I could almost count individual drops. This was the first running water I had seen all day, and you would have to have been desparate to have drunk it. Fortunately I still had half a litre of my 3.5 litres left.

You cross the creek here and the slopes improve as you continue down, eventually getting into taller trees and a little shade as you get closer to the road and Roses Gap itself.

Unfortunately the road is not the end of the story. You have decended more than you ascended, and along with a 6 km trudge on molten asphalt, you have around 500 feet of ascent to do too. Boy was I glad to see the camping ground of Troopers Creek some six hours after leaving it!

 

 

Quicktime movie of the walk (6 MB)