Mt Bartle Frere

Monday 30th September 2013

I'd been to the Visitor Centre when I arrived at Yungaburra yesterday to find out about walking routes up Mt Bartle Frere, Queensland's highest mountain, which I'd been told was quite close by. Normally Visitor Centres here in Australia are very good and have all the information anyone could want, but this one didn't have much about walking trails. Eventually I managed to get the staff member to find a map on the internet and print iit out for me, but it wasn't very detailed. I was told that it normally takes about 8-10 hours to do the return walk to the summit, so I thought that I should be able to manage it in a day.

I didn't manage to get a very early start, it was about 8am by the time I set off to cycle to the start of the walking track. It looked from the map that it was only about 15kms away so I thought I'd be there by 9am. In fact it turned out to be nearly 30kms away and about half that was along a dirt road, also I had to go up a lot of hills to get there. Result was that I didn't get to the start of the walking track until 1030am. On the way I took a photo from the Lamins Hill lookout:

It was somewhat overcast and it looked as though rain was coming. This is one of the wettest areas in Australia and weather conditions here can change very suddenly.

Anyway I locked my bike up at the start of the walking track and set off on the climb. There was nobody else around. After about 30 minutes I came to Bobbin Bobbin Falls, which I could tell from the map was the only source of water on the mountain, so I took the opportunity to fill up my water bottle:

Bartle Frere is entirely covered in dense rainforest, and the path to the summit is very uneven and overgrown. It's quite well marked with little orange reflective arrows on trees every 50m or so, but it's still quite easy to lose your way there, and apparently many people do.

In places there are large boulders you have to climb over:

...and there are tree stumps and other obstacles everywhere to trip over:

At about 1pm, after 2 and a half hours hard climbing, I reached the lower summit which is about 1470m above sea level. I decided to turn back at this stage, because I could see that it was another 2km and 200m ascent to the main summit, which would take at least another hour, and I knew that I had another 2 hour bike ride back to Yungaburra when I got back down to the car park. I was already pretty tired and didn't want to risk an injury from tripping or falling, as there was no mobile phone signal there and nobody around to help if I was unlucky enough to injure myself. It gets dark here around 6.30pm and I didn't want to be out riding after dark.

It took longer to come back down than it did to go up, I had to take it easy to avoid slipping on the path. I was back at the car park around 4pm and set off on the ride back straight away, pausing soon afterwards to take a final photo of the mountain that I had unsuccessfully tried to climb:

I was back at the hotel in Yungaburra around 6pm, pretty well exhausted. It was disappointing not making it to the top of Bartle Frere but at least I did have a good scenic walk through the rainforest, and even saw a few snakes. Maybe I will return and attempt the climb again one day, but would get there earlier and would avoid having to do a long bike ride as well on the same day.

Distance cycled today 60kms, trip total 313kms