Pages

Sunday 2 February 2014

Exploring the forest




We live on Mount Glorious about 40km drive northwest of Brisbane.
I'm tempted to say we are lucky to live here but that is not the case, we simply made the decision to move out of the city 3 years ago and never looked back.
However in that past 3 years I think we have only ventured into the forest for walks about 4 times.
There's such a great opportunity to explore so once again I made the 'decision' to start walking/jogging/running the tracks and fire trails and get to know the forest a little better.

First up we, as a family walked the local tracks down to the waterfalls last week, and this week I took my daughter on a shorter 2.5km walk down one of the other local walk tracks, nice and easy.

Then last Friday I headed down one of the fire trails. These are 4wd tracks that run all through this massive state forest to provide access for park rangers, bushfire crews and search & rescue teams.

First track all down hill to start with. once I reached the 2km mark I turned around and slugged it back up the steep climb. Mostly walking with short sprint bursts. Was only 4 km all up and not that hard so today I woke up at 5am to head down further down the same trail.

There are paper maps available from the park head office however these trails are not marked on Google maps. So tracking where you are going in the forest is difficult. I ended up finding a GPS app for my phone called map my walk. I dont listen to music or anything as its nice to listen and experience the forest and all the wildlife. So I just used the app to track the distance and map the trail so I kind of know where I've been.
Screen Grabs of the 'Map My Walk' app from todays trail. 


After completing the Intuflow Beginner program as a warm up, I started record on the app and left the phone in a tiny back pack bag for the whole trip, so I could enjoy the experience rather than focus on gadgets the whole way.

Its a nice trail. lots of wallabies and heaps of different parrots and other birds. At one stage there was a stunning view of the early sun over the Lockyer Valley and hot-air balloons over Ipswich, which I had to stop and check out. The terrain also changed about 3 times from rainforest at the top to eucalypt forests, and general scrub at the lower part. The local Olley's Organic Honey also have their hives hidden all over the mountain which smell incredible as I trek past.

Overall I managed to cover about 6.4km and elevation down about 220m (See image above). The way back up that 220m was intense. Ill have to try and make it further down the trail next time.

At the moment I'm just walking the bulk of the way till I'm able to eventually run the whole distance.

Goals
- To run 10km+ every other day.
- Explore more of the Forest trails.

No comments:

Post a Comment