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| Following Condons Track up towards Monda Road. |
The last Saturday in January promised to be a mild day with the chance of late showers so, with one eye on an up coming walk in Peru and the need to keep up some kind of fitness, I decided to head up to Healesville and walk a circuit up and over Mt St Leonard. I've walked this circuit before, although last time was in the opposite direction, and I remember it as being a bit of a ball breaker, just what I need for a training walk. One concession I made was to head off fairly early, I was at the trail head and ready to go by 9:30am, about the time I'm usually contemplating my second coffee on a normal Saturday morning.
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| The start of the walk at Donnelly Weir. |
The first issue for the day was to find the correct trail, after scratching my head for a bit and looking at the GPS I figured that I should have a look at my notes, sure enough all was soon clear and I was on my way. Initially my route followed an open water race in the direction of Maroondah Reservoir, when the water race buried through the side of a hill I started to climb. I was aiming for a walking track called Condons Track but to get there I had to negotiate a maze of service tracks, I was walking through the catchment area for the reservoir which meant that most of the tracks were closed to the public. Luckily the route is fairly well signposted and on the couple of occasions that it wasn't obvious I just avoided the tracks that had no public access.
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Easy walking initially along this water race.
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| Time to start climbing, the centre track is mine. |
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About an hour after leaving the ute I was at the start of Condons Track, I now would leave the service tracks and head up a walking pad for a while, this was also where the degree of difficulty might ramp up a bit if my hazy memory was correct. Immediately on starting up Condons Track the vegetation closes in, this isn't a bad thing however as its the soft and lush type of flora and not the hard and scratchy type that typifies a lot of the scrub in Australia. Its also prime habitat for lyrebirds and after hearing quite a few I was rewarded when I spotted one in the scrub, unfortunately there was too much flora between me and him (I think he was a 'him' because of the sexy tail feathers) to get a photo. Trudging on up the steepening track I got a few views through the trees to Maroondah Reservoir down in the valley to my right.
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| The start of Condons Track, the little stick figure walker looks a bit to jaunty to me. |
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| The bottom of Condons Track has a bit of hardware to make it a bit easier. |
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| The Mountain Ash has an under story of ferns. |
Halfway up Condons Track I decided to have a blow for a couple of minutes and get some water into me. Putting the pack down something orange on the ground caught my eye, on closer inspection I found a yabbie (if anyone knows the correct name let me know) making its way through the leaf litter on the ground. So now instead of having a relaxing drink I spent the next ten minutes crawling around the bush on my hands and knees trying to get a photo of the yabbie, I'm glad his old mate Mr Tiger Snake wasn't around as I shimmied around on my knees. Pulling myself away from the yabbie I continued on up Condons Track, the gradient easing towards the top, and after meeting an old fire track I soon popped out on the large fire break that is Monda Road.
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A yabbie on the track.
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Monda Road doesn't sound very inspiring for walking but its actually pretty good. The road is closed to traffic and you can either walk the gravel surface or the wide grassy verges on either side. Monda Road essentially follows the top of The Great Divide more or less staying on the crest, the only negative is the sections to the north that have been clear felled. After a bit of a break I headed off along the undulating road, in the distance I could see some dark clouds building but for the time being I walked along in bright sun shine. I left Monda Road near its intersection with Hardy Creek Road and took a wide grassy fire break up and over a hill, shaving a few hundred metres off the walk but adding a few metres of climbing at the same time, on rejoining Monda Road over the hill I only had a little while to go before I left it for good and turned to the south towards the summit of Mt St Leonard. The last section along Monda Road is actually part of the Bicentennial National Trail that runs from Cooktown in far north Queensland to Healesville in Victoria, I think that one will have to wait till I retire!
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Monda Road, clear felled to the right, water catchment to the left.
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Monda Road.
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I headed straight up the grassy fire break.
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| A BNT marker. |
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The summit of Mt St Leonard was now in site and within reach but there would be no view today, as I was stumbling up the last climb from the north the cloud was overtaking the summit from the south, I'd missed getting a view by a few minutes, oh well. On getting to the summit I climbed up the old fire spotters tower ignoring the huge new tower and telecommunication structure looming above me in the mist. Sitting on top of my pint sized tower in the cloud I was hoping for a break in the weather however the longer I stayed the wetter it became, so after scoffing down some lunch and giving Sam a call (who was sitting in a cafe on the Mornington Peninsula having lunch with Belinda) I figured that it was time to start the descent.
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The large fire tower on Mt St Leonard.
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| On top of the old tower, the weather wasn't getting any better so I thought that I'd better head off. |
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Finding an old overgrown track heading down the spur to the north I quickly lost height, I was pretty keen to get down before it got too wet as the track was fairly steep and slippery and a bit of rain wasn't going to improve the situation. I'd dropped out of the cloud when my old track met up with Road Eleven coming in from my right, the gradient now lessoned a bit making for easier walking, only the occasional shower scudding through added to my discomfort. Road Eleven like Monda Road makes for good walking being closed to traffic and having a wide grassy verge to walk along. It was on this grassy verge that I had the highlight of the walk, I had another Echidna sighting but this time I managed to get a photo of the Echidna's head, it was only a couple of posts ago that I was lamenting my inability to get a photo of anything but an Echidna's bum. After my Echidna encounter it was less than an hour down the road and I was back at the car park at Donnelly Weir.
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The Mountain Ash near the top of Mt St Leonard.
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It took me about twenty minutes to drop down out of the cloud.
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Hey Hey, I've finally got a photo of a whole Echidna.
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| And another one. |
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The Dirt.
I walked 26.1 kilometres and climbed 1218 metres according to the GPS and was on the track for 7 hours. I used the maps in the GPS as well as the VICMAP 1:25,000 Juliet North & Juliet South topo map. I also used Chapman's notes from the first edition of his Day Walks Victoria book, the walk is #33 in the book, the walk isn't written up in the later edition. Its a fairly hard walk with a lot of climbing and Condons Track is particularly steep and can be slippery and overgrown. All that said the walk goes through an increasingly rare thing, some un-burn't Mountain Ash forest, the Mountain Ash are a beautiful majestic tree that don't like being repeatedly burnt in hot bushfires, unfortunately a lot of our Mountain Ash trees are now having to be re seeded by helicopter due to the frequent hot bushfires that now tear through the hills.
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| At Bingley View on Road Eleven, I'd come down from the tops that are covered in cloud. |
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