Spring Mountain Reserve

We headed off in the morning hoping to hike the Gamlen Circuit from Harding’s Paddock Campground, in Flinders-Goolman Conservation Estate. It’s 3km which I thought might be a reasonable challenge to do with Nora. She either loves bushwalking or hates it and needs to be carried the whole way, so keeping the worst case scenario in mind, I’m pretty sure I could carry Nora for 3km if indeed I haven’t already done so on a previous adventure. But I’ll have to wait a little longer to confirm my beliefs because we didn’t get to do the Gamlen Circuit cos it was closed due to recent bushfires damaging the track apparently.

I thought they really ought to have said that on their website so I wouldn’t have driven all the way there and checked on phone to confirm they had indeed omitted that information from their website. But no, classic me, there it was in a big yellow warning box at the top of the page. Nevermind, this just meant the day’s adventure had taken it’s first twist. It’d take more than that for us to throw in the towel so we headed on to the next destination: Spring Mountain Forest Park. Ooh and we passed a road called Hughes Road, gosh I felt like a real tourist pulling over to take a picture of the signs!

So we navigated to Spring Mountain Forest Park and I could see on the maps where the trails begin (particularly up to the peak) but more bad luck was on our way, in the form of another locked gate! It turns out that the last 1.5km or so is a tarmac fire trail which had a gate across it and I thought walking 1.5km just to get to the start of the bushwalks was a bit much, so I checked the map and it seemed you could access the start of the walks from a different road from the west. We’d need to drive south and around the Forest Park to get to it. So we set off, again, and were struck by even more bad luck (well, the missed opportunity for good luck): the neighbourhood we were driving through was having council collection soon, so most properties had a little pile of broken junk out the front. I spied a blue kids bike with pedals that would have been great for when Nora graduates from her balance bike, but in the time it took for me to pull over and allow a car to go past so that I could do a U-turn, a ute pulled in, grabbed the bike and left. I couldn’t believe it! It was such a quiet and pretty area, very large acreage blocks, obviously plenty of bushland around, there really weren’t many cars out and about. So for that ute to swoop in at just that moment was rather unlucky indeed.

I should add that this whole time Nora had been fast asleep. She woke around the time we pulled in to Spring Mountain Reserve because I saw the sign for it and thought we may as well check it out. It looks lame from a bushwalking standpoint, although it had a very large playground and two big park gyms. So we kept rolling, trying to make it to the other side for the Spring Mountain bushwalks, took a turn which quickly became unsealed and lined with farms. This is where we came across a herd of cows milling around the road. I must admit I was a tiny bit nervous cos some of the cows didn’t seem too bothered about moving out of the way and so we drove very close to them as they eventually budged enough, I was worried one of them might get all aggy and have a go at the car. Fortunately, we were all able to keep our cool. Next some horsies and after that the realisation that the map had failed me yet again as we came across our third impenetrable gate of the day, this one for private property. By this stage I’d conceded and wished only to eat some food and find somewhere nice to spend the day, so we headed back to Spring Mountain Reserve, hoping it hadn’t taken offence to our earlier rejection.

At the Reserve the wildlife sightings continued, with a whole bunch of kangaroos laying on the lawn. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see kangaroos so close to a city, so that was a nice surprise. We had lunch in the car and finally our bushwalk begin. We wandered along the paved walking circuit, around the back of the pond, to a part where there was a large clearing in the reeds and indeed by cutting through there you could access a small bit of bush. A very small bit of bush, but bush nonetheless, finally! We just wandered around there really slowly, helping some of the bark fall off the eucalypts, choosing the perfect bushwalking stick and trying to work out what all the different noises we could hear were. We met two butterflies who were best friends! I believe the black one was a type of Varied Eggfly and the other was a Common Grass Yellow. And we saw a very bright black and orange insect which really fascinated Nora. We didn’t walk for too long in the grand scheme of things, but it was still nice to just be surrounded by trees and let the senses explore.

We finished up the day having lots of fun in the park gyms at the Reserve and then visiting Hannah McKinley and Pete at their place in Springfield Lakes for a cup of tea (and another play in another playground). I’d never been there before but it was only 12 minutes drive from the Reserve and a nice little housing estate, definitely well located if you’re a keen bushwalker!

So that was our story from this bushwalking adventure and the first blog post I’ve written up. Hopefully there are just as many blog posts as bushwalks still to come.