Friday, January 1, 2016

Mollinsons Galleries

I'm catching up on writing up trips done over the early part of the summer while we are house-sitting in Wodonga. It is nice to be indoors during this time as, not only does everything get insanely busy during the Christmas school holidays, but, it turns out that it's pretty bloody hot in this part of the country at this time of year.

We had been up on the Buffalo plateau about three years ago when we had strung together a bunch of shorter walks around Lake Catani, The Gorge and The Haunted Gorge, and also walked up to The Horn. This time around, it seemed like a good idea to go to a slightly different area of the park. Among the maze of tracks that exist, we came up with a loop walk that started at the Reservoir picnic area, and went out to Mollinson's Galleries past some granite rock formations and came back via Rocky Creek track and the Wild Dog Plains.

One of the problems with writing these trips up weeks after the event is that I often can't remember much about anything, particularly if the trip was a simple track walk like this one. I can't recall anything notable about this walk and, truthfully, I don't recall it being all that interesting. Certainly, walks around The Gorge are a lot more interesting if you only have one day.

We parked at the Reservoir picnic area and walked back up the road to the well marked track start. This is also where you start the walk out to Mount Macleod. Very quickly, we took a signed turn-off from the main track and started walking southwest. Immediately, the track was much more overgrown and, overall, this area of the park does not seem to get a lot of visitors. We took a side track out to Og, Gog, and Magog, a cluster of large granite boulders with a view over Wild Dog Plains. The next side trip you can do is out to Eagle Point, and, very unusual for us (me in particular) we passed this one by.

The next detour is out to Mollison's Galleries where we decided to have lunch. This is a bit of a strange spot as the track just ends in a cluster of granite boulders and you really have to scramble about quite a bit - we crawled up through a cave - to find a location where you have any kind of view. Frankly, Mollison's Galleries was a bit of a disappointment.

After lunch we walked back to the main track and took the track that heads south down to Rocky Creek track. I'm not sure when a Ranger last passed along this track as it is quite overgrown and a bit hard to follow in places. A couple of times we had to backtrack to pick up the track again. The track seems to descend a long way. In reality, it is only about 200 metres. After a couple of kilometres walking downhill we intersected Rocky Creek track - an old fire road - and the rest of the walk was just a steady uphill plod to Wild Dog Plains and past the Reservoir.

1 comment:

  1. My children called the track to Mount Macleod "the walk from hell." The repeated up downs of the track encouraged us to divert to a lesser track which was quite overgrown and felt snake infested. We aborted the walk prematurely and our exit was punctuated by learner driver son bumping a large boulder with the underside of the car quite loudly. OOps.We did enjoy the many other walks around Lake Catani though. Every night we did the Chalwell galleries near the campground in a different light. Just before Christmas our radiator broke down, we were stranded up the mountain, everything was booked out, had no money, dh refused to get us from Melb. as he was working. We limped into Bright, where the local car mechanic drove us back up the mountain to fetch our gear and let me and my 3 kids at the time camp in their house for 3 days while awaiting a new radiator from Wangaratta, which he fitted after hours on Christmas Eve. Very kind people. Oh and I could share another story about car breakdowns at Cape Bridgewater, in fact my son has good geographical knowledge when you prompt his memory with oh that place, that is where x broke down, so his teacher commented, "Is there ANY place you haven't broken down?"

    ReplyDelete