MOUNTAIN LAGOON – January 31 – February 1, 2026
The first weekend in February, John G puts on a special trip to celebrate his birthday. This year he’s turning 60, so he had planned an overnight walk. The destination was on my wish list so I quickly booked in, as did two of my bushwalking friends, Heather and Jeff, we’d be returning to a campsite that we’d stumbled upon 5 years ago.
So, Jeff, Cheryl, Heather, Jim and I joined John and Kathy for the birthday celebration. We’d sussed out the weather and whilst it was going to be hot, the forecast wasn’t so bad that any of us had second thoughts – there’s a lesson to be learned there.
On the Saturday, we all met up at the Grumpy Bakers, a popular stop on the way to our walk. We sat around enjoying pastries and coffee, pumped for the trip. A 15 minute drive then had us at the T3 track head, where we left our cars. We then headed off track on what we expected to be a 3k walk down to a creek. A few climbs (around 40m) up hills and then a steep descent to the creek. In a perfect world, we should be at the creek by noon, easy as, right?
We headed up the fire trail we’d driven in on, for about 60m, then headed into the bush. After about 15-20 minutes we were on the ridge that we would follow (John and Cheryl I think enjoying the view).
Heather and Jim at the start of a small climb on the ridge.
The group, our first stop (photo: Heather)
Fabulous views, the hill in the distance is beyond our creek, so we could sort of see our destination. By now we’re all suffering from the heat, as you can see, stunning sunny day.
Kathy resting at one of our rest stops.
We’d walked about 700m by now, and it’s around 11.30am; we have more than 2k to go. A combination of scrub-bashing, and the heat made the trip much more difficult than it should have been. Some of us were suffering from the heat, so, at this rate it was unlikely that we would get down to the creek “before nightfall” as John said. So, we decided to head back to the vehicles and access the Colo River by the well-formed T3 track.
We were back at the vehicles about an hour later (moving slowly due to the heat). We sat in the shade and had cold drinks then reassessed our options. Did we want to walk the 3k T3 track down to the Colo? Everyone agreed that that was the best option, so, off we headed – this photo shows the start of the T3 track.
Even on the track, the walk was punishing, too hot and not enough shade. Here’s Jim after our lunchtime, around 1.30pm – we’re halfway along the track at this stage (I think).
Things went pretty much downhill after lunch, and although the forecast called for 30°C, it was much hotter than that (none of us had a thermometer). Thankfully Heather had distributed small fans to us women, so in the absence of a breeze, we were able to fan ourselves. We were all “sweating like pigs”, and even though our shirts were sweat soaked, that didn’t even give any relief. I was stopping every 15 minutes to rest – it was a very long trip down to the River.
The lookout at the end of the ridge before the descent (around 200m I think), looking down at the Colo River – seeing the river gave us hope for the future. (Photo Heather).
The descent to the River, is punishing, only 200m or so descent, but the track is quite eroded and there’s lots of leaf litter on it, so you have to constantly watch where you’re putting your feet. Even as we’re going downhill, we still had to take rest stops.
I think Jim and Cheryl arrived at the river around 3.00pm, Heather by 4pm, Jeff and me around 4.30pm and Kathy and John around 5pm. Usually, it’s a 3-hour trip, it had taken most of us 4½ hours+!
The Colo River, the sand bank was pretty big, I’ve been there when there was hardly any sand, and had been stressing a bit about the potential small campsite area (particularly as I expected there’d be other campers down at the river)!
As soon as we hit the river we were all into it to cool off. I’d forgotten that the Colo is lukewarm (I had envisaged a lovely cool river) but even lukewarm it was better than nothing.
Kathy, John and Heather in the background putting up their tents. We lazed in the river for about an hour before we were ready to put tents up!
We’ve now all recovered from the walk down, so out came the drinks and nibbles, we weren’t moving far from the river though!
It was too hot away from the river, so we all brought out dinner over to the shore. Kathy and John’s nachos looked amazing.
Heather is known (not for her purple hair), but for bringing chocolate mousse, strawberries and Cointreau on overnight walks. Unfortunately, the heat wasn’t factored in, and the river wasn’t cold enough to cool it down, so she made chocolate syrup – we all ate it though, couldn’t let it go to waste.
We spent the rest of the evening by the river!
Unsurprisingly, a thunderstorm moved in around 9pm, I hadn’t put my tent fly up so that I had more air flowing through the tent (it was still hot), so I had to get up in the dark to put the fly on the tent – and then found that the bloody MSR Hubba fly was sticky on the inside (a problem with MSR flys – I hadn’t stored it the way I should have – Ah well!)
We were all up early in the morning, my plan was to start walking around 7 or 7.30am to avoid walking in the heat. The temperature had dropped substantially, but the humidity was around 100%. Everyone else had the same idea, so we were on the track early for the steep walk up through the cliff-line.
Once again I was hot and sweaty, but once we got up the top of the cliffl-ine, every once in a while, a lovely cool breeze hit us. The walk out was uneventful, and it took us between 3 and 3½ hours to get back to the cars. I’ve never been so pleased to see the cars before!
So, what was the temperature … in Richmond, down on the flood plains it was 40°C, we figured it was around 37 – 38°C up in the “mountains”. We’ve suggested to John that he move his “birthday trip” to a cooler month, say May! He seemed open to the suggestion!
I’m going to make sure that I never do an overnight walk again in the heat of summer, in hindsight I should have put my tent up at the car and let everyone else go down to the Colo, if I’d had a book or something to read I probably would have, I’d walked that T3 track at least 6 times and knew that there wasn’t much shade in the heat of the day, ah well, hindsight is 20/20.
Thanks John for putting on the walk to Tootie Creek, I guess we’re going to have to give it another go. Big thanks to Heather and Jeff for looking after me on the walk down, walking at my pace so I wasn’t by myself! It think we all learned some lessons from this trip LOL.