2010/11 Australia trip - Girraween |
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We reached Girraween park just before the New South Wales border. The park’s at about 3000ft, and was 
wet and cool.
There were kangaroos and kookaburras in the campground, and also crimson rosellas, a sign that we were getting into the southeast. John later remarked that the kangaroo in the picture looks just like the one in the Qantas logo.
Saturday October 30th
We were going to spend the day hiking in Girraween, “the place of flowers”. The scenery there is unusual. The park is centered around Bald Rock Creek which runs through a great basin of bare granite, bordered by enormous rounded boulders, many of them fractured into stranger shapes and piled into improbable heaps. The basin is much larger than the creek, and its bare surfaces are decorated with great cracks and streaks of algae.
I took an early morning sampling of all the nearby trails, and then we opted for the 
Junction Trail, which follows the creek to its junction with Ramsey Creek. It was easy walking with the great expanses of granite, and the trail went through a mass of flowers, mainly yellow and white and lilac flowering shrubs, but also blue irises and red seed pods and buds. 
With the recent rain, the creek was cascading across the granite and feeding small waterfalls. All in all, a hike I’d recommend and it kept us busy for most of the day.
Late in the day we hiked up to Castle Rock, a walk with less flowers but more rock formations. Granite erodes to domes and rounded boulders, delicately balanced on each other. The domes are flat on top, but the sides are always exfoliating like onions, and they develop sloped shoulders and sheer drops. The domes in Yosemite are the classic examples.
They all have the same characteristic: trip and roll and you’re gone! We climbed up and across the granite shoulders and crawled through cracks in the mountain, but the final twenty feet to the top was just too exposed, with no handholds, so we left that for somebody else to try.
As well as the birds and kangaroos, Girraween had an assortment of other wildlife. The trails had giant ants that were ready to take on anyone that threatened their patch. The frogs in the ponds 
were noisy enough to drown out conversation, not an unpleasant noise, but just loud. The most obvious problem was the kamikaze beetles, like giant June bugs, that divebombed our headlights, harmless, but they’d ricochet off into the stew.
Sunday October 31st
There were also more biting bugs too as we now had bumps on top of our bumps. Despite all this, it was a shame to be leaving, but we had to move on. But first we had to check out Dr Watson’s Waterhole as that was supposed to be in an area for seeing sundews and orchids. We didn’t find the sundews, but there were plenty of new flowers and the orchids 
and this rather sad cicada that had stuck to a discarded band-aid.
On our way out we passed this kangaroo, already well into happy hour.
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