Back to Victoria, but this time purely for fun. Having spent a couple of days last year in the Emerald–Monbulk area for work, I'd been wanting to come back to explore the Dandenongs at my leisure.
With Tuesday's weather looking much more promising than the next day's, I decided to try this relatively short loop walk. That length turned out to be somewhat misleading: several significant steep sections made this considerably more challenging than I'd expected.
The start of the circuit was an auspicious setting, at a picnic area among the magnificent, towering mountain ash that are such a distinctive feature of the landscape around here.
The first steep climb began immediately, heading straight up Jacksons Hill Road. It was a great way to get heart, lungs and legs pumping.
It was all worth it, though. The views descending Ridge Road were spectacular, looking east towards the high country as the fog started to clear from the valleys.
The view to the west was equally striking, although it wasn't possible to see Melbourne CBD (which I think was around to the right in this shot below).
It was slightly too early in the season to see most of the deciduous trees in their full autumn colours, but most were starting to turn and here and there a few specimens were already putting on a show:
After a while, the descent became steeper and Ridge Road became a walking track. Overnight rain had left the path slick and slippery, and the covering of wet leaf litter didn't help. It was about now – just when it would have been most useful – that I realised I'd left my walking pole in the car.
Undoubtedly, the highlight of this section was a giant eucalypt, the ground around its base domed by the detritus of (perhaps) hundreds of years of bark and leaf litter. The photographs entirely fail to give a sense of the scale of this behemoth.
Meanwhile the track continued to drop steeply, flattened out briefly, and then dropped again, and a few hundred metres of level walking along Avard Road at the bottom came as welcome relief.
This, it turned out, was the literal low point of the walk. The route turned right and plunged into temperate rainforest, climbing gently alongside a creek. Although the track was very overgrown in places, requiring much of it to be approached bent double, the beauty of the tree ferns and the occasional glimpses of the creek more than made up for it.
Along the way I startled another walker who was consulting a paper map and who asked about the way to Telopea Steps. She seemed surprised when I checked the route on my phone, as if this was a new and slightly dubious method of navigation. But it did allow me to point her in the right direction, and within a few minutes I'd reached the object of her enquiry. Telopea Steps are a long flight of relatively new wooden steps leading up to Telopea Street and back into residential streets, which after a while brought me down to the Puffing Billy railway tracks and some cute local art.
The path alongside the tracks made for very pleasant walking and, after a stop for sandwiches, a chance to watch the train itself chug sedately past on its way up to Emerald.
Of course everyone on the train waved (there seems to be a sort of unwritten law about this), and of course I waved back, half embarrassed and half enjoying the silliness of it all. As it turned out, I caught up with the train and its passengers at the next station, where the down train was also waiting at the other platform: presumably this is the crossover point where the two services are able to pass on the otherwise single-track line. Anyway, it was a treat to be able to watch both depart.
From there it was back onto the road and one last, long hill leading back to the start of the circuit. Someone had very generously left a basket of home-grown organic apples for passers-by to help themselves – so I did (watched carefully by a kelpie who can just be seen behind the fence in the photo below).
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