Touring the Sunshine Coast Hinterland

Last week I arranged to go on a medium format photo excursion with my buddy Will from college to the Glass House Mountains.

We'd thought it would be nice to get there for sunrise, so - in retrospect, quite stupidly - decided to leave at 4 am. Yes, you read that right.

So I went to bed on Thursday night at 8pm, only shortly after Eloise, having packed up my things and prepared myself as far as I could, and when the alarm clock went off at three thirty I was out of bed like a shot and started clattering stealthily around the house brusing teeth and making coffee and sandwiches and so on and so forth.

Will was punctual and we set off up the Bruce without hindrance, deciding to watch the sun come up at the Glass House Mountains lookout, sensibly to the West of the Mountains, and turned up there in the pitch black at 4.45.

At that point, with a biting wind howling across the hills, we thought it might be a good idea to find out when the sun actually rose, then hunkered down for our forty minute wait rueing our early start.

So we sat on the lookout platform, I with my Rolleiflex, Will with his Hasselblad, swapping cable releases and watching our tripods wobble horribly in the gusty wind by the light of our little torches.

Depressingly a large band of cloud obscured half the sky keeping the sun off the mountains, but there may be some nice photos in there, who knows. Anyway the sun came up and the wind howled and we became very cold indeed, and to be honest it was a bit dissapointing so around seven we decided to go for coffee.

Out target coffee destination - and a risky one - was a one-horse town called Peachester but for giggles we decided to go cross-country. Did I mention that Will had brought his 4WD? Probably I hadn't.

So we embarked into the forest along logger's tracks and power-line maintenance tracks jiggling about like no-ones business, through muddy bogs and rutted tracks before becoming quite convincingly lost. However, steering by the sun and approximately by the power line brought us out only a couple of kilometres away from our destination.

Nicole and Eloise phoned at that point. You won't remember that Will was the man who threw stones at me at the river but Eloise certainly did and I had a strange conversation with her about that fact and reassured her that I wasn't in any immediate danger
Whilst that was happening Will decided that Peachester's one horse wasn't serving coffee and we were soon in sunny Beerwah.

The sun was getting pretty warm by now and I was feeling temporally discombobulated as it felt around midday. But we still had to wait for the cafe to open, it actually being just before 8 in the morning.

Coffee succesfully imbibed, we planned to go up to Maleny and Montville to check out the views from up there. A likely looking mountain presented itself off to our right so we identified it as Mount Mellum and cruised up there to snap off the back of Will's ute, reversed onto the concrete base of a mysteriously absent house on the south-facing slope.

Then up to Maleny, where we once again took in the views before a stroll around the forest. Picture two men, weighed down with serious cameras, tripods, lenses etc.

"Taking some photos, are you?"

Duh.

In the forest we were presented with plenty of tree texture and buttress roots and dancing shadows and very nice it was too.

Time for coffee, around midday.

Fancying some waterfall action - another tall order in drought-ridden Southeast Queensland - we tried out Lake Baroon underneath Montville, which looked good from above but which was pretty grim from below, then Kondalilla Falls.

We took in the upper falls - the one before you go down the epic stony staircase - but it was a bit slack on the falling water front so we did another little walk punctuated by buttress roots before wending our increasingly weary way back to the car, then to Montville, for coffee. May a thousand virgins weep tears of happiness into my coffee.

The plan was then to go to Wild Horse Mountain and Will offered me my first cross-country opportunity which I histantly grasped with both hands, having become used to handling the ute which I'd been driving since Lake Baroon.

So we dirt-tracked it across the forest before hitting the Bruce again and down to WIld Horse Mountain.

We didn't hold out much hope for the sunset as Queensland was delivering its standard beautiful cloudless blue skies, and we weren't wrong as the spectacular panorama offered to us from that viewpoint didn't really work against the bright sunset sky, which in the absence of clouds was tremendously troublesome and boring.

Oh well.

Home again home again. Back by seven or so, in bed by nine, knackered.