Girraween

The alarm clock went off at 4.30am.

Autonomically the inclination was to return to slumber but semi-concious reflex took over and instead I packed, whilst simultaneously cooking toast and making coffee.

When Will turned up at 5, he informed me in a good-news bad-news type way that his license had expired and that therefore I would be doing the on-road driving. That served as both the good and the bad news. We set off for Girraween.

At 9am or so after a stop-off at Warwick for croissants we arrived at Girraween and paid for our camping permit and all that before sitting down to a coffee in the valley.

The plan was to climb the Pyramid first off then we'd see how we went and maybe go for Castle Rock in the afternoon.

Girraween is a landscape that is defined by granite. It's a rugged place (though strangely no carpets) that is dotted by huge granite domes on top of which site huge granite boulders. Sometimes there are more boulders sitting on top of those boulders.

The elements have worked their magic over millions of years and lichens have eaten their way through stone until some of the boulders are apparently very finely balanced on top of one another.

And the hills are hellish steep.

Still not to be overawed by silly things like steepness, we climbed through the forested hills till we broke the tree-line then climbed the granite dome of the Pyramid. We looked at it across the way and a little eye-protraction said thirty degrees of protracted inclination, inclining us towards slow, careful progress with shoes pointed up the hill.

The Pyramid used to be called the Dome and this seems a better name really, since it isn't a Pyramid... it's a dome. A rocky bubole that penetrates from the green landscape and surges up for a considerable scramble before flattening out to reveal a crown of titan rocks, the most striking and famous of which stands on a tiny little foot and looks for all the world as though it's about to fall over.

The rock on that side of the dome falls away precipitously and slightly gut-wrenchingly into a valley. On the other side is the Second Pyramid.

We hung around at the top of the Pyramid taking in the expansive valley around us.