Hollow Mountain - Mt Stapylton

Circuit Walk, August 1998 (The truth revealed)

The official walking tracks in this little area of the Grampians go up Hollow Mountain and up Mt Stapylton but there is no marked track between the two mountains despite their proximity. Descriptions of the circuit walk commonly rate this 5-6km walk as 5 hours, Hard. There appears to be one part of the walk that everybody neglects to mention and that was the part that I had completely forgotten about when I suggested the walk to Paula and Julie. I think their parents still have contracts out on me.

We set off from the Mt Zero Picnic ground and followed the road around to the start of the Hollow Mountain track. The track gradually builds "interest " as it changes from flat and sandy to rocky to following a broad ledge diagonally up a cliff face with a few tight squeezes between rocks. In no time at all we were walking up the broad rock face to the entrance to Hollow Mountain.

To add to the "adventure" I decided it would be more fun if we went through the mountain rather than around and so we walked into the cave, crawled lizard like across to the west side, climbed up and back to the east side and up again and back to the west side to finally emerge from the mountain out of a small hole near the top. Piece of cake.

From here it's just a small climb up to the top of the ridge ignoring the fact that a slip backwards would result in a fall of over 100m. The view across to the Taipan Walls shows that the cliffs actually slope beyond vertical which is why it's such a popular spot for climbers. But we had done our climbing and it was now on to the next challenge listed in the official descriptions of the walk, a 2m drop onto a boulder wedged into a crevice at about the halfway mark of the walk.

20m on however the "track" (enough people do this walk to leave a worn path in the rocks) got what I would call "uncomfortably close to the edge" of a very long drop. I didn't remember this and it's not in any descriptions I've read, what was it doing here?! This was perhaps a tad more "adventure" than I had described to my companions but hey, I had done it before, it must be OK.

A quick survey of the options available and sure enough, perilously close to the edge was indeed the only way... for the next few hundred metres. At least the view was great, from across the plains to the west of the Grampians to the little tree tops way down below. There was a brief moment of relative quiet on this section of the walk and it was quite possible that they were plotting a way to do me in. This was later confirmed at the lunch break. By the time we got to the 2m drop in the middle of the walk we were ready for almost anything. The lack of convenient footholds slowed us down at this point but we got there eventually and took advantage of the sheltered location to have "lunch".

From here it's off to the east side and a much gentler sloping rock face until you reach a break in the ridge line above to the west which is the access to the next broad rock face....