The glass mountains

Last weekend I made a trip towards the Glass House mountains national park, located approximately 45 minutes from the Sunshine coast. The park is a heritage-listed national park within Queensland. The park consists out of a flat plain in which rhyolite and trachytes volcanic plugs are located. Those cores of the extinct volcanoes were formed around 27 million years ago. The parks contains 12 mountains, of which Mount Beerwah is the highest with 556 m, although it is not allowed to climb this mountain.

During our trip we climbed mount Ngungun of 253 meters high. The trip was not very difficult because on steep places the Aussies were so friendly to place stairs, which made the climb much easier. The walk to the top was around 1 hour, so that is not so long and it was easy to do for all kind of people, even for children.

When you are on the top of the mountain, you have fantastic view over the whole area. You can see the ocean, the coastal zone area with all the hotels and bars and more inland you see the suburbs with all the houses (including swimming pool). On the other side towards the hinterland there was this amazing mountain ranges and forest area in which a lot of flora and fauna is living. When we were busy enjoying the view, flies were busy attacking us and biting us so that was a disadvantage from being at this height.

The names of the mountains are originating from the indigenous language (Aboriginals). The story of the origin of the mountains is as follows. Once upon a time, there was a father, mother and son. The father saw that a major flood from the ocean was coming towards the land, he sent the son towards his mother to warn her. When the son was almost at the mother he got scared and ran back. The father was so angry that he threw a kind of boomerang towards his son. Today this still can be seen because the father is looking at his wife and son, while the mother is looking at her son, the son looks towards his father and has a bend in his neck.

After this climb we went towards a lookout point were all the different mountains can been seen. At this location we also did a rainforest walk, which was very nice and informing because during the walk the kind of rainforest and the flora changes every 100 meters. In this way it was very nice to see all the different kind of rainforest. Fortunately, we did not see any snakes or other dangerous species.