Sunday morning after the usual very early little wander around with the binoculars and camera followed by another solid breakfast we were ready to take on the big one - Mount Gundabooka! The above pictures is a panorama stitched together from 7 pictures by use of autostich, press the picture to see a larger version.
Walking to Mount Gundabooka is hard work, walking back is hard work as well, but more importantly it is tricky business! The reason being that it is very easy to walk towards something you can see - like a mountain - but hard to pinpoint a clearing in some dense mulga forest ... even if you put the worlds biggest (value for money) dome tent in it. However if you have a compass - and someone that knows what direction to point it in - you can find everything ... or at least back to your tent again. Our companions were both greatly skilled in the art of following magnetic needles so we happily joined in on some exceptional rewarding off the track bushwalking to and fro the Gundabooka range.
Walking through the mulga scrub might not be the thing to do if you are exclusively into landscape photography (or a lot of other things), but wildlife was quite fantastic - I will add some pictures from the traverse of the scrub in the next post - Climbing the mountain though was an entirely different thing :-)
The range makes a great climb, it looks impressive on pictures but is still fairly easily negotiated and gives plenty of opportunities of enjoying the views across the mulga covered plains below.
Like all good mountain climbers we celebrated our conquest of the summit with a feast. Ours consisting of a delicious combo of chocolate, scones and water while enjoying the vistas and the acrobatic performance of the woodswallows flying around us, how good was that? ;-)
Half way home the sun broke through the clouds and we realized how lucky we had been by having a thin layer of clouds protecting us most of the day. Walking in the outback under a burning sun very fast becomes unpleasant. First of all because it is bloody hot and secondly because of the army of flies assaulting every exposed part of your body, trying to suck any moisture out of you - or of a sweaty backpack :-)
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