Cathedral Rock Scramble

We've been waiting for a weekend with good weather to go up to Cathedral Rock National Park and last Sunday turned out to be the day.  It's the last major National Park in our area we haven't visited and the bush hike there is touted as one of the better ones in the region.  Like New England National Park, the drive in off the highway is a narrow unsealed road through cattle pastures, a bit too pitted and rocky to be comfortable in the Berlingo.

Trailhead

The trailhead starts at the campground.  We were about five minutes behind a group of German tourists, and just a couple minutes down the walk we saw a big snake sitting just a foot off the trail in the sunny grass.  (How big, you ask?  Big enough!)  We nearly walked right by it without seeing it, actually, and we both sneaked by it nervously.  It didn't move--still asleep, I guess, in the cool morning air, because  presumably the other group walked by it as well.

 

 

 

A few minutes later and the tall grasses open up into this spongy marshland meadow ... and a minute after that we saw a kangaroo sleeping in the grass, still within sight of the parking area.  The trail then heads into a rocky eucalypt forest, surprisingly green despite a hot and dry November, with ferns along the Snowy Creek in the shady valleys and flowers everywhere in the dappled shade.  The rest of the kangaroo family bounded by, an adult with a young one in tow.

 

 

 

 

It's not long before the trail begins to steadily climb upwards with the pink granite boulders peeking out here and there beneath the moss and lichens that cover them.  The "Top Walks in New South Wales" guide book describes this hike as "Moderate [Grade] - some gentle stairs and fun rock scrambling is involved" and as soon as you take the path off the loop toward the main feature, Cathedral Rocks itself, it is pretty much all upwards-rock scrambling.  Just before the top, it turns into a bit of a maze squeezing through narrow passageways between and beneath the rocks, and always scrambling upwards.  When it feels like you've finally reached the top, there's just a little more before the true summit.  A chain is bolted into the rock to help you get up .... though we found it was even more helpful for getting down.

 

 

 

 

Going up..

 

It was quite a view from the top.  Probably the only place we've been where you can look all the way around and get a 360 view.  From the top you can see Round Mountain, the highest point in northern New South Wales, as well as some of the other rock piles we had or would walk by.  A big skink came out to say hello.. let me take a photo before hiding away again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going down.

Reid gives a little bit of a sense of the scale of the rocks, but as always
it's so difficult to give it justice in photographs.

One of the easier rocks we had to sneak under
(some were a bit of a tight squeeze.)

The rest of the loop was a bit easier as it was mostly downhill, though it was getting close to noon and was a bit hotter.  A still, sunny day, and while much cooler than the weekend prior, it was still pretty warm.  Coming back to the start of the loop, the kangaroos were still in the grass, having an early lunch ... unfortunately we missed a rather comical picture of a kangaroo staring at us with a bunch of green grass sticking out of its mouth.

 

 

 

 

Really cute young one!

It was actually a bit nerve-wracking to be so close to the kangaroos!
The buck watched us back the entire time.

The drive back to the highway along the unsealed is always preferable to coming in because it's not the first thing in the morning.  I snapped some pictures of the grove of strangely purple-hued eucalyptus and we admired the idyllic pastures along the road.  (For some reason, despite seeing it with my own eyes, I cannot imagine Australia this green.)

 

 

 

 

 

The clouds were rolling in on our way back to Armidale, in fact it began to rain just minutes after we got home.  The last bit of interest of our excursion has to do with the fact that the cattle in this region are occasionally free-ranging outside the fenced pastures (especially, I assume, when it's dry and the grass is in short supply.  Going we didn't see any, but coming back we had to stop for a crossing. I have encountered cattle on the roads before here, but not on the 100 kph highway.  A good reminder, I suppose, of the rural area we live in.

The fields are so brown here compared to the forest.