The Grampians #1

Tucked in Victoria’s West are a series of sandstone mountains called Gariwerd by the original owners and inhabitants and Grampians National Park by the government. Colloquially, they are called The Grampians.

We made a 4-day visit in October this year and had a pretty busy time doing walks and sight-seeing. I’ll break it into 4 days so that it isn’t too long and will include a summary of the time at the beginning and what we left out, would do again, or didn’t know about at the end.

Where we went, while staying in Halls Gap Gardens Caravan Park , which is a 15 minute walk from Halls Gap and good value. Most of these are walks, so anything NOT a walk I put in italics.

• Halls Gap
• Tourist Centre
• Grand Canyon
• Silent Street
• Pinnacles
• Splitter’s Falls
• Reed’s Lookout
• The Balconies
• McKenzie Falls
• Lake Wartook
• Brambuk National Park and Cultural Centre
• Lake Bellfield
• Dunkeld
• Victoria Valley
• Mt William
• Silverband Falls
• Venus Baths
• Halls Gap Botanical Gardens
• Boroka Lookout

DAY 1

We began at the visitor centre in Halls Gap, where we received excellent advice about walks, drives and 4WD drives for anyone who hasn’t been here before and wants to make sure they’ve seen the sights.

We decided to head to the Wonderland carpark and do a couple of the shorter walks, starting with the Grand Canyon  0.7 km.

This led quite easily to the Pinnacle walk 1km, so we headed there, passing through Bride’s veil falls,

Silent Street

And finally to the Pinnacle. The whole walk took about 100 minutes, and the hardest was the Pinnacle, with steep uphill rises towards the end, for about 10 minutes. The rest was pretty easy but you couldn’t do it if you are in a wheelchair or very large, as the ascent from Silent Street is very narrow.

Why go home before doing the other, short walk you had originally gone there to do? At 0.7km, the walk to Splitters Falls seemed small fry. It did not take long, but was downhill on the way there and, obviously, uphill on return. It’s a pretty walk that passes rock pools, where people sat eating lunch and I imagine in the Summer it would be a great place for a dip. We passed some walkers who said the destination wasn’t worth it, but we disagreed, as Splitters Falls was pretty and you can get up close.

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Returning to our site for lunch, we stopped very briefly before heading out again to Reed’s Lookout,

And The Balconies

Deciding to press on, we went to McKenzie Falls and did a couple of ‘side’ lookouts before deciding on the major lookout from the top. There were two reasons for this – the person at the tourist centre had said you can get better photos from there, and it was slightly uphill at first, which was appealing after our rather huge amount of uphill climbing, our ankles and knees protesting at the thought of a steep uphill return.

Accidentally taking a wrong turn on the way home, we ended up at Lake Wartook. An ok sight, perhaps the most useful feature is the anglers club situated here.

Understandably, we were pretty sore the next day and one of us has a plan to include more, lengthy walks, more regularly.

Even though it was around 2 degrees C at night and cool during the day, the sun is at work, so always take hat, water and sunscreen.