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Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

PostPosted: Sat 26 Nov, 2016 5:54 pm
by eug
After reading up a bit and getting some extra info from metastable, two of my friends and me decided to do Toolona Circuit as our first overnight hike. It was a pretty good trip; we started at about 11.45am, had lunch at Pinic Rock, and got to Bithongabel at around 4.45pm.

The final creek crossing before Bithongabel is at or somewhere near Poojabinya Falls - that is where we got our water from. We still had about 4L of drinking water left over between us, so I just filled up my water pack with 3L of creek water to use at camp.

I logged all the water crossings we came across on my GPS, hopefully they'll help someone in the future. A few of them were dry though. The crossings/falls weren't all signposted so I'm not sure what most of them are.

It wasn't as strenuous as I was expecting, but it was definitely more tiring than a "packless" hike, of course. My pack was 9kg, my friend's pack was 11kg. The temperature was expected to drop to around 13 degrees so we brought a sleeping bag along with our tent. We were thinking of just bringing a sleeping bag, but metastable advised against it - which was a good thing, as we found a few leeches around the tent as we were setting up! I'm just imagining waking up in the morning with leeches in my nose. :x I spotted a red-bellied black snake behind our tent in the morning too.

Surprisingly, Bithongabel had 1 bar of Optus 4G, 1 bar of Telstra 4G, and sometimes 4 bars of Telstra 3G.

We slept in and left at around 11am, got back to O'Reillys at around 12.30pm, had lunch there, and headed back. We spotted another red-bellied black snake basking in the sun on the trail on the way back.

Thanks again to metastable for posting about it a few times here. The fact that he did it easily with his 7-year old gave us overnight-virgins some confidence. :)

Google Maps link - https://goo.gl/3PX0Qc
GPX file -
Toolona Creek Circuit.gpx
GPX file
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Original post references:
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=23359#p305183
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=17784#p237764

The uprooted tree route (ha!)
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Picnic Rock
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Another uprooted tree on the trail
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Chalahn Falls
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Toolona Falls
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Near the peak of Mt Bithongabel, before the campsite
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Sunset at the campsite
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Sunrise
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Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

PostPosted: Sun 27 Nov, 2016 6:15 am
by metastable
Nice writeup guys, good to see it all went well.

Hope it's the first of many more.

Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

PostPosted: Fri 23 Dec, 2016 2:04 pm
by awildland
Great spot for your first overnight hike! How huge is that fallen tree!!?? Beautiful spot.

Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

PostPosted: Wed 04 Jan, 2017 1:14 pm
by Jayps68
Nice works guys, Bithongabel is one of my fave sites. next time go the other way and do the Albert River Circuit, the falls are diferent there, and quite spectacular.... I actually think I was camping at Echo a while back and heard one of those tress fall down the escarpment. Extrraordianry noise that rang around the range for minutes.