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.
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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The uprooted tree route (ha!)
Picnic Rock
Another uprooted tree on the trail
Chalahn Falls
Toolona Falls
Near the peak of Mt Bithongabel, before the campsite
Sunset at the campsite
Sunrise
