Backpacking in Girraween National Park

Summit of South Bald Rock. These giant boulders are everywhere.
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This is another backpacking trip with my Outdoor Education class, just like the MeeBunn-Bia entry.  For this trip we traveled in small groups around Girraween National Park for 40km (25 miles) over the course of 4 days.  Girraween is known for what they call "large granite domes."  This pretty much means that the tops of most of the mountaints are just smooth granite all the way around the top, and actually a lot of the ground around the whole park is pure rock.  There are also huge granite boulders everywhere.  All we really did was walk.  We were responsible for all the navigation and planning of the trip and the instructor just stopped in to talk to us in the morning and at night.  The majority of the trip was on the park trails but for about 4.5km we went "offtrack" and navigated our way to a point on the map.  This was a fun way to travel, although it was quite a bit slower, but was hard on some of the group members who have quite the fear of snakes b/c several km of chest high grass, creeks, and forest isn't quite their calling.  Girraween is home to 2 of Australia's most poisonous snakes...yikes.  But on a more happy note there were a lot of kangaroos!  The first 2 days we didn't see any and were fairly disappointed but the third day there was a 1km stretch where we managed to run across about 50 kangaroos.  One really nice thing about the trip was that we were able to hike to different summits almost everyday for sunsets or sunrise, or just midafternoon.  And the views were great, we didn't see a cloud the whole trip so that made for pretty nice sights on the summit.  On the last morning we started a sunrise hike up Mt. Norman at 5am.  It was still black when I got out of my tent, but we still made the hike.  It was worth it.  Once the sun was up we did a but of exploring around the top and there were a few caves to go through, one of which was really interesting.  By interesting I mean very tight.  It is called "Solution Tunnel," I don't know why, but anyways, you start out scooting on your butt into the entrace, then after about 10ft you turn onto your hands and knees, and after about 10 more feet your sliding on your stomach for the remaining 100ft.  Not for you if your claustophobic.  But we all made it out safe and it was nice to get home for my first shower and change of clothes in 4 days.