Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

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Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

Postby eug » Sat 26 Nov, 2016 5:54 pm

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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eug
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Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

Postby metastable » Sun 27 Nov, 2016 6:15 am

Nice writeup guys, good to see it all went well.

Hope it's the first of many more.
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Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

Postby awildland » Fri 23 Dec, 2016 2:04 pm

Great spot for your first overnight hike! How huge is that fallen tree!!?? Beautiful spot.
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Re: Toolona Creek Circuit, Lamington - Overnight Hike

Postby Jayps68 » Wed 04 Jan, 2017 1:14 pm

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.
It's all the same to me where i begin, for to there I shall return...
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