Goin' Feral One Day At A Time: Melville Caves Eastern Circuit, Kooyoora State Park

A typical Kooyoora State Park scene.

I’ve visited Kooyoora State Park a few times over the years, the open forest and rocky country generally making for nice walking, in my experience. One spot in the park that I’ve never walked is the out in the eastern part of the park. With us being up at Bendigo for a couple of nights I was looking through my book of walking notes for an easy walk that Sam and I could do on our way back home when I came across a walk Mr Thomas calls the Melville Caves Eastern Circuit. A quick read of the basic notes suggested it would be a fairly easy, short stroll that should feature a lot of the rocky country that the small park is known for, sounds good.

The Parks Vic guys are a pretty conservative lot when it comes to their walk timings I've found.

Arriving at the small car park where the walk starts Sam was a little perturbed to see that the Parks Vic guys had the walk rated as a medium grade walk that would take us 3 hours. After another quick look at my notes and map I reassured Sam that it wouldn’t take us anywhere near that long, even at the slow pace that I was walking with my crook back (we did this walk the day after our recent Bendigo stroll, check out that post if you want to see some spectacular bruising on my back). So, after locking the ute we wandered off east along the almost level path, under what was a cold but clear winters sky.

Setting off this morning, the Eastern Circuit is fairly clear for the most part.

There are plenty of large rocky outcrops to explore beside the track.

Mr Thomas suggests that there are no side tracks to worry about on this stroll but his notes that I was using are over 20 years old and now there were a couple of un-signposted pads heading off to the left, one fairly close to the start and one near the end. It’s not hard to stay on track though just keep to the right at any track junctions and you should complete a clockwise loop eventually. Wandering along this morning we soon passed the first track heading off left and then started climbing gently, all the while being serenaded by screeching Corellas. Now when I say we were climbing, in reality the climbing was very gentle, made even easier by the fact that the track was frequently passing close to huge granite outcrops of rock, all of which beckoned us to climb onto and check out the views.

There are plenty of noisy Corellas around here.

The track topped out eventually at a spot I’m guessing is the spot Mr Thomas has marked as Eastern View on his map. This was a open area of huge granite slabs that the track crossed. The pad now started to alternate between these large open slabs and areas of dry open forest in between the slabs as it slowly started to arc around to the south and head down a beautiful, open spur. The rocky slabs are probably my favourite type of terrain to walk on but crossing these sometimes presents challengers to the track builders, the issue they seem to face is how to mark the track across large areas of bare rock. The guys up at Mt Kooyoora have used the occasional cairn as well as a few track markers siliconed onto the rock to keep the punters heading in the right direction. Really though the best course of action when crossing these open rocky spots is to head in the direction that the rock funnels you, if you are walking the crest of a large slab then generally stay on the crest (unless there is an obvious marker telling you to change direction), same thing if you are following a ledge, stay on the ledge as it’s the obvious route…you get the idea?

I'm guessing this is Eastern Lookout.

There were the occasional Galahs out and about adding a splash of colour.

This could be Eastern Lookout, at least it's looking east.

Dropping down the spur we doubled back to the west a bit and met and old fence line. I’m guessing the country on the other side of the fence was the last section added to the park as the vegetation was quite denuded, having the appearance of being over grazed. After following the fence line for awhile we continued to drop a little into, crossing a dry gully and passing by some particularly photogenic rocky outcrops. This was the low point of todays stroll and we now started to once again climb fairly gently north west and then north back towards the ute. The climb once again being punctuated by numerous stops to check out all the weird and wonderful weather sculptured rocks. Just before we arrived back at hex ute there was another pad harding off to the left that added a little short term confusion to our walk but after avoiding that track it was only a few minutes later that the ute appeared through the trees and our stroll was over.

Leaving Eastern Lookout the pad starts to drop gently down a long rocky spur.

There are a few track markers siliconed onto the bare rock.

Heading towards the lowest point of the stroll we followed this old fence line for awhile.

I'm thinking children would enjoy exploring all the rocks along this walk.

We've just started the final easy climb back up to the ute.

The Dirt.
According to the GPS we walked 5.1 kilometres and climbed 147 metres on this easy stroll. Contrary to the information at the start of the walk, the walk took us well less than two hours to complete even at my sloth like pace and stopping to take numerous photos. The country around these parts feature a lot of dry Box Eucalyptus type of forest as well as the ubiquitous big granite rocks, this type of country always seems to be home to a lot of native birds and animals and Kooyoora is no exception in that regard. We used notes out of an old book by Mr Tyrone Thomas called 60 Walks in Central Victoria’s Gold Fields and Spa Country, the book was published in 1998 though so the notes are a little old. For more current information I’m thinking Parks Vic will probably have enough (free) stuff online that you could easily complete this walk safely. To access the start of the walk requires around one kilometre of dirt driving but the track is fine for a conventional car.

The Dirt.
Kooyoora State Park, 2016.
Bendigo, 2018.
Moliagul, Moliagul Historic & Cultural Features Reserve, 2017.