Buckley Nature Conservation Reserve Walk - October 2021

After another stormy week we got a great morning over at the Buckley Nature Conservation Reserve.

This little walk is another stroll that Sam and I headed out to do early on a Sunday morning. Traditionally our Sunday mornings were spent enjoying breakfast together at our favourite local café, however since getting out of lockdown we are a bit reluctant to eat in and risk exposing ourselves to someone with Covid and therefore having to go back into another home quarantine type of situation. At the moment it's takeaway coffee and an egg and bacon rolls from the café and then on to do another short walk - in this case a little bit further down the Mornington Peninsula at the small Buckley Nature Conservation Reserve.

There's room for quite a few vehicles in the car park off Balnarring Road. 

Arriving at the small car park I was pretty happy to see that the little park was actually open as we'd had some very big storms down in this part of the state in the last week. Our walk was really a rough circumnavigation of the park and with the park only stretching for around a kilometre along each axis then this was never going to be an over taxing day out. Initially we headed east along the firebreak that runs beside Myers Road, crossing an unexpected section of boardwalk along the way as we slowly made our way down to the vineyard that marks the eastern boundary of the park. 

We headed off east along a grassy firebreak.

I was surprised to find a long section of boardwalk crossing one of the swampier gullies.

Back on the fire break again.

After taking the obligatory photo of the vineyard we picked up another track that headed away from the park boundary a little and swung into the interior of the park. The wet dewy grass was starting to once again test out my trail runners this morning, although after hitting the southern boundary and turning north back towards the ute a the wet grass became the least of our problems. While we hadn't had to negotiate many fallen trees so far we now arrived at a long section of flooded swampy track - there'd be no getting through this with dry feet. With Sam opting to retrace a little and take a different route my autism kicked in and I decided to wade through the swamp. Well wade is maybe exaggerating things a tad, however the water was over sock height and it was that way for around 50 metres I guess, so it was a bit of excitement. Emerging from the far end of the swamp I soon re-joined my outward route near Myers Road and retraced the last few metres back to the ute, arriving back at the ute at almost the same time as Sam arrived.

Reaching the vineyard we swung south.

Once again we were walking a soft grassy fire track. 

Buckley Nature Conservation Reserve. 

This is pretty much where Sam pulled the pin and returned to the ute by a drier variant.

I continued to plough on.

I'm thinking the wetter months may not be ideal for this section.

Not even boots and gaiters would of saved me here.

Emerging from the swamp the going was very nice again.

Nice walking in the Buckley Nature Conservation Reserve.

The Dirt,

According to my GPS I walked around 2.6 kilometres and climbed about 45 metres on this easy stroll (my GPS didn't save the route so I've posted a screen shot of my Alltrails map off my phone). This walk is all along tracks or fire tracks and even features a section of boardwalk. I'm thinking that the middle swampy section would only be an issue in our wettest months, the wade through did add a bit of excitement - or you can just walk up the grassy firebreak beside Balnarring Road and miss it altogether. This is another Alltrails walk although I think Ken Marten may have also written it up in his Mornington Peninsula Walks book. You could probably safely get around his walk with Google maps I'm thinking.

Relevant Posts.

Kangerong Nature Conservation Reserve Walk, 2019.

Bald Hill Walk, 2014.

Retracing the last few minutes back to the ute.

This is my Alltrails map - no GPX map for this walk.