I now find myself out in western Victoria in Grampians National Park. Grampians got hit really hard by bush fires this past year and as a result a huge swath of the park is closed. Several of the trails I wanted to do are off limits due to the fire damage. Luckily, enough of the park is still open to make it worthwhile.

Driving here from the coast I saw a lot of these signs. I have a good feeling about this.

I arrived into the town of Halls Gap, the gateway to the Grampians and where I’ll be laying my head the next few nights. I checked into my hostel and then decided to walk the half mile to the main drag to check things out and get some food. As I was walking along just minding my own business, this kangaroo jumped out from between two houses, and started grazing in the front yard. Eureka! He did scare the crap out of me, but I finally saw a kangaroo.

And just as I was entering the main street I spotted another one in the bushes. Awesome! I suddenly find myself wondering how close can one get to a kangaroo before it gets spooked and attacks. Let’s hope I don’t find out.

Well, I came here to hike, so let’s get started. I picked the most popular and famous hike to do first, the Wonderland Track to the Pinnacle. In Australia, they don’t call them trails, they call them tracks.

There’s a reason why this is the most popular hike in the park. It’s pretty amazing! There was so many crazy rock formations all the way up. Then you come to a section they call the Grand Canyon. I would’ve called it Petite Canyon, but they didn’t ask me.

A good distance after the Grand Canyon you come to another little canyon called Silent Street. It turns out though, when you fill it with lots of children, the silence disappears. There was also supposed to be a waterfall right before Silent Street, but it was dry, a zero gusher.

Finally, I reached the Pinnacle and got some birds eye views of Halls Gap below. This was a good start to my time here for sure.

I took the long way down from the Pinnacle to make a pseudo loop hike out of it and enjoyed more crazy rock formations.

Back at the trailhead, there’s a second trail that goes to Splitter Falls. Let’s hope this one is better. The trail follows the stream down, but there’s a disturbing lack of water. It’s a good thing this place is beautiful or I might be really disappointed. When I reached the “falls”, I could hear a faint trickle of water somewhere. I had to search a bit, but I found it. I’ll be generous and give this a 0.2 gusher. You can use the fern leaves for scale.

Back in Halls Gap I walked into town again for dinner and there was a kangaroopalooza. Actually, it started by just looking out the back door of my room. This first guy was in the hostels patio area. There was also one right across the street wondering what shenanigans I was up to.

There was about two dozen of them in the park. It turns they like to graze all over town at dusk. And I’m ok with that!

Next, I hit the second most popular hike in Grampians, MacKenzie Falls. There are actually three named waterfalls on this hike, but I saw probably eight waterfalls in total on this trail. I started with the short walk out to the high lookout point with my fingers crossed. Look! Water! Yay!

I was really worried that everything would be dry here, but thankfully, the MacKenzie River had lots of dihydrogen monoxide. The steep trail down first passed by a different waterfall, Broken Falls.

Further down a million steps of doom from Broken Falls is MacKenzie Falls. I’m giving all of the waterfalls along the MacKenzie River today a solid eight and a half on the super scientific gusher scale. Pay no attention to the railing that I absolutely did NOT climb over to get this pic.

I still had about a mile or so to go to the next official waterfall. The hike followed the river very closely and passed by several other unnamed cascades along the way. This was a really fun hike!

The goal was to reach this amazing location, Fish Falls. It was actually like five different falls, but whatever. What a great spot! Now the hard part. It was all downhill and downstairs to this point. Time for me to climb.

After the MacKenzie Falls hike, I decided to try my luck by driving about thirty miles to see some aboriginal rock art sites. The information on the parks website wasn’t very clear, but I got the impression that they were open, but no. The gravel road to the sites was closed because of the fire damage. Oh well! So, I drove the thirty or so miles back and stopped at a couple of viewpoints on the way. The best one was the Reed Fire Lookout.

In the pic above you can get some idea of the extent of the fires. The highest peak on the far left is Mt Rosea. I was planning on climbing that one, but it’s off limits. Instead I’m going to be climbing Mt Abrupt, almost in the center of the pic, in a couple of days. I checked, it’s definitely open. Here’s a close up of it below. It’s the tallest one in the center.

Back in Halls Gap, I found more kangaroos right next to the parking lot and behind the restaurant I was just about to eat at. They’re everywhere!

Due to the fire closures, I was in need of finding some different hikes to do. Between the information at my hostel and my hiking app, I found Hollow Mountain and thought it sounded interesting. It turned out to be a really rewarding hike involving quite a bit of rock scrambling up that big cliff in the pic below.

The climb up wasn’t as difficult as it looks in the pic. Along the way there were some cool rock formations too.

Almost at the top there were several caves. I guess that’s how this mountain got it’s name. I wasn’t brave enough to go spelunking, but trust me, those caves go all the way in there.

Finally, I made it to the top. The actual summit is in the pic below, but I didn’t go up there because it was swarming with wasps. If you remember anything about my last trip in Thailand then you’ll remember I ain’t messin’ with no foreign wasps. Big nope! Instead I enjoyed the incredible views of Northern Grampians from just a few feet shy of the summit.

Leaving Hollow Mountain I got a great view of it from a distance. I’m 99% sure Hollow Mountain is the one on the left and further out, and the closer one on the right is Mt Zero. I haven’t seen any kangaroos outside of Halls Gap at dusk, but I have seen a lot of kangaroo and wallaby road kill in my wandering. I’ve also had three wallabies dart out in front of me while driving this week. It’s pretty scary!

There are six aboriginal rock art sites in Grampians National Park, so of course I set out to find them all. Two of them were in the closed fire stricken part of the park mentioned earlier. The others are somewhat scattered all over the park so I visited them all on different days, but here they are all lumped together. A separate trail from the parking area for Hollow Mountain took me to the first site, Gulgurn Manja Shelter.

Also in the northern part of the park is the Ngamadjidj Shelter. Supposedly there are sixteen figures here, but some of it is badly damaged and I could only make out twelve.

In the far eastern part of the park, an area known as the Black Range Scenic Reserve, is the most important rock art site in all of southeastern Australia. Bunjil’s Shelter depicts Bunjil and his two dingo assistants. He is the main character in the creation story of all of the southeastern aboriginal tribes, although they have different names for him. After creating everything, he ascended to the sky as an eagle to protect all of nature, where he still is to this day.

Finally, way out west in the Black Ranges State Park, there was the Mudadgadjiin Shelter. The gravel road out to it was ok until the last couple of miles. My little MG made it, but I did consider turning around once or twice. Anyway, it was the most difficult one of these rock art sites to get to and it also had the smallest payoff, but that particular pin in the map is secure.

My final day in Grampians I drove to the southern extreme of the park to climb Mt Abrupt. I had to drive through the whole central part of the park to get there which is closed, with the exception of the main highway. There was an awful lot of fire damage the whole way.

I arrived at my trailhead and started off on what was about to be the longest and most grueling hike of my time here. At the start was this helpful little sign. The four spectacular ways that this hike is going to try to kill me.

I may have gotten a bit overconfident with this one. I discovered that I could hike to Mt Abrupt’s neighbor first, Signal Peak, and then traverse over to Mt Abrupt from there. The climb to Signal Peak alone was pretty intense and involved about a million steps of doom.

I got within about fifty feet of the summit of Signal Peak and then quickly turned around and noped outta there. Wasps! Lots of them! What is it with Australian peaks and wasps?! I did have a great vantage point to see my ultimate destination, though, Mt Abrupt. It’s the highest one furthest out. I’m not gonna lie, I was already pretty tired at this point. I let out the smallest little hint of a whimper, took a couple of pictures, angrily ate a Mars Bar, and then got to work.

Thankfully, the traverse over to Mt Abrupt wasn’t bad at all, until I got to the steps of doom and had to start climbing. This is just a fraction of the steps of doom, of course. There aren’t enough terabytes on this camera to get pictures of all of them.

I finally made it. There were wasps at the Summit of Mt Abrupt too, but luckily, they were far enough away to not be too much of a nuisance. I was able to sit and relax for a bit, gaze across at Signal Peak and ponder how far I had come, and remind myself that I was only half way. Now I get to do the whole thing again in reverse.

I can’t even describe how tired I was after this hike. Luckily the next few days are going to be easier and will give me a chance to rest and recover. Tomorrow, I move on to the next stop and hopefully, no wasps! More to come…