Lake Mountain Snowgum Walk, Yarra Ranges National Park - February 2006

Lake Mountain

I recently stumbled across these old photos lurking on a scratched CD. At first glance I figured that there was nothing of much interest and consigned them to history. Something made me have another look though, you see this area of Victoria got well and truly torched in the Black Saturday fires and I'm thinking that the scenery up at Lake Mountain has probably changed a little since our visit in 2006. Now I haven't been back up to Lake Mountain since then but all the photos that I've seen of the area feature forests of stark dead, bleached white tree trunks crowning the hills like stubble, not the beautiful snow gums that I remember from this visit.

The wide grassy cross country ski trails make good walking trails in the warmer months.

On another stinking hot summers day Sam and I headed up to Lake Mountain, we'd figured that the altitude would take the edge off the heat a bit and that proved to be true. Lake Mountain is fairly quiet over the warmer months and I remember parking at the almost deserted Gerratys Carpark before heading off into the snow gums. This walk largely follows a series of cross country ski trails and the open grassy tracks made for nice easy walking today. First up today we very gently climbed up towards The Camp past Echo Flat and a few nice tarns. The Camp sounds interesting but is basically just a junction of ski trail, after that we continued on still gently climbing to Panorama Lookout which had some distant views of The Bluff.

Echo Flat features a few tarns.

Plenty of snow gums on this stroll, always a good thing in my eyes.

Mount Bullfight Lookout

The easy walking continued this afternoon as we swatted the flies away, soon reaching the northern extremity of todays walk at Bullfight Lookout. This lookout is the highest spot on the Lake Mountain Plateau at 1480 metres so it made a good spot to stop for awhile and take in the alpine scenery from the top of the large granite rock that is the lookout. After having a bit of a break and checking out the remains of the old Boundary Hut we started our walk back to the car park. With the extensive number of ski trail up here it was fairly easy to walk back following different tracks, therefore avoiding the dreaded re-trace. Our route back this afternoon largely followed Muster Trail, an avenue of grass through the snow gums that made for a very pleasant way to end the day. I'm thinking that I'll have to get back up to Lake Mountain and do another post soon, it will be interesting to see how the country is recovering from the fires, I suspect that it won't be quite as pretty as what we found back in 2006.

All that's left of the old Boundary Hut now days.

Sam, heading back to Gerratys Carpark down Muster Track.

The Dirt.

According to my old notes Sam and I walked around 11 kilometres this afternoon, I haven't got a metres climbed figure but I'm guessing it wasn't much, probably around 200 metres all up I'd think, with all that in mind I'd rate this as a easy walk. I used a set of Glenn Tempest's notes out of the 2005 edition of Daywalks Around Melbourne. The walk is a nice way to experience some nice alpine scenery without a huge drive from Melbourne. Lake Mountain is (was?) a bit of a ghost town in summer so don't go expecting much in the way of food or drink, the open grassy meadows would make a nice post for a picnic though.

Relevant Posts.

Cathedral Range North Loop, Cathedral Range State Park, 2016.

Cathedral Range Southern Circuit, Cathedral Range State Park, 2015.

Hey hey, this walk even featured an igloo.