Mt Difficult

The Mt Difficult Range stretches between Roses Gap and Halls Gap enclosing Lake Wartook. The terrain of the mountains is, as the name suggests, very rugged with high, often overhanging cliffs surrounding the range. Mt Difficult is on the NW side of the range and offers several great walks.

My first walk over the range was one of those walks hikers prefer to call "experiences". We did a car shuttle with one car at Troopers Creek and the rest at Roses Gap. We set off from Roses Gap and walked up to Beehive Falls and then upwards to have lunch below Briggs Bluff. As we continued after lunch the weather began to deteriorate with low cloud and drizzle setting in. Whilst visibility wasn't good, to say the least, I still managed to navigate by what landmarks we could see and found every track junction on the map. By the time we got to the short detour to Mt Difficult the weather had really closed in and we didn't even bother going up.

We continued on to find the last track junction, a track running east down into the middle of the range marked by a small square peg in the ground, and then put the map away as all we had to do was follow the track down. Little did we realise that this was such a popular climbing area that there were parts of tracks leading all over this particular part of the mountain. We found one of them and, like all the rest we found after that, it promptly stopped fo no apparent reason.

Piece of cake, I thought. To our left there was a high line of cliffs, to our right, somewhere down below, was the road. At worst we would walk straight through the bush towards the road. The fact that we couldn't see the cliffs was a bit puzzling but I put it off to the low clouds. Then we reached our first waterfall. Another check of the map meant we could be in one of three places, all along the same creek. The creek ran down past the carpark where we had parked one of the cars earlier that morning, so all we had to do was follow the creek.

Then we came to the second, higher waterfall. This obviously placed us further up the mountain than I thought. We found a way around it and continued on until we found a third waterfall...... and the line of cliffs. Now I knew exactly where we were. The only problem being that there was a 200m vertical drop between us and the right track. The map indicated that there was a gap in the line of cliffs where it was not completely vertical. It was 5:00pm by then and getting dark. We followed the the line of cliffs and eventually found the gap and another track. In the fading light we managed to find and lose that track three times but finally found the right track and made it back to the cars just before it became pitch dark.

Since completing this walk I have been back up to the area we were "misplaced" in several times to photograph the waterfalls and rock formations of this area. It's much easier in daylight, although with several parallel lines of cliffs on the mountain, navigation can still be a bit tricky. I have also spoken to several people who have done the same walk and nearly all had a similar problem. The simplest way to avoid this problem is to do the walk in the reverse direction i.e. Troopers Creek to Roses Gap.