Walking with Carol and Steve - Sheep Hills Track

Carol and Steve came up to visit this weekend. The plan was to do some walking to remind us of what it might be like when we do the UK Coast to Coast later this year.

They arrived Saturday lunchtime after coming through Ballarat - just need to teach Steve that there is a bypass around Ballarat nowadays that takes a good 40 or so minutes off the trip!

After lunch we set off to do a walk. We were using two cars and the original intent was to traverse Mt Rosea but when we looked at the time we realised that we might be finishing the walk in the dark. We decided that Sheep Hills Track was a better option for the afternoon as it is a relatively easy walk that is primarily downhill. That could be our warm up for the Rosea to Borough Huts walk the next day.

We left Steve's car at the end of the track and took ours up to the Mt WIlliam car park. The walk leaves the road about 500 metres from the car park and the first 100 metres or so drops down quite quickly. The girls set off ahead, just pausing long enough to issue a warning that the first section was rather steep and to be careful. I set off with Steve behind me and heard a strange sound only to turn around and see Steve disappearing off the side of the track and wedge himself in some branches. I desperately wanted to get out the camera but my concern for his well being prompted me to give him a hand to extricate himself. Thankfully he was physically unhurt - perhaps just mentally scarred :)

After the initial steep section the track makes its way down the flank of Mt William back to the road. Cathedral Rocks are on your south the whole way down and the walk gives you great views of this feature.

The track also features some endangered plants, which in typical endangered plant style, grow right in the middle of the track. One of these plants (Grampians Rice-flower or Pimelea pagophila) has come back after the fire and is in fact quite prolific in some sections of the track.

The track eventually reaches Mt William Creek where a bridge has been built. Along the way Frank had a great deal of fun with Steve by insisting on taking landscape shots using the portrait mode or orientation, as with the photo below :-)

From this point the track takes you up over a small hill before descending back down to Fyans Creek where there is another bridge. The strong winds of a few weeks ago appear to have hit this section of the track quite hard as quite a few dead trees have come down off the side of the track and a substantial branch has been broken off one of the larger trees.

We finished the walk as it was coming to dusk. We thought we might get a good view of the sunset from the top of Mt WIlliam and so we drive to the top only to discover that it was covered in fog. There was, however, a strange cloud formation where the cloud that was causing the fog had a distinct layer that it was sitting on. You could see the bottom of the cloud as a flat plate all the way down towards Mt Abrupt and Dunkeld.

Sheep Hills Track