Our Sunrise in the Grampians, Australia

The Grampians National Park in Victoria, Australia is renowned for its breathtaking views and gorgeous sunrises. Breathtaking is certainly one word for it, as you can see from the visual recollection of my “Grampians Sunrise” encounter!

We set off from Halls Gap in the early hours of the morning, whilst it was still pitch black outside. The idea was that we get to our destination in time for sunrise, have a bit of time to explore and look about the place, take in the views and whatnot before finally hitting the road and heading on.

It was cold. Really cold. Being the genius that I am, I neglected to take a coat with me on the trip (a proper coat anyway) so I spent most of the time with my thermals and 2 hoodies on. Such a fashionista. This also explains why some of my shots are blurry, almost shivering with no tripod is not a good way to be taking photographs.

The first thing that you’ll probably notice about this picture is how eerie it looks. The whole place had an eerie feel about it. First thing in the morning, thick with fog. It felt like something out of Silent Hill, but it was exciting at the same time. The picture above is part of the trail in the Grampians that we walked down to get to one of the viewing platforms in time for sunrise. If I recall correctly it was about a 1km walk. Nice and refreshing!

Thats when we found these:

To this date I have no idea what these are, who put them there or what their significance is. If anyone does know, PLEASE let me know. They were absolutely everywhere. Thousands of them, all neatly stacked. I’m really glad I wasn’t the person that had to build them.

Then, we watched sunrise:

Not joking, this was the view we had. You can trust that the views up there are spectacular, just look at the cover image for this page for a taster of what the Grampians has to offer. Sunrise though, signaled the beginning of our curse. Fog. Everywhere. We literally couldn’t see anything. I even tried looking down the side of the mountain, this is the result:

After our disappointment, we headed back to continue our trip. An evil genius among us (Looking at you Ron) decided to build a little rock stack in the middle of the pathway, which we used to scare some of the group. Must’ve been aliens following us or something, I swear!

We grabbed a few extra photographs and chilled out for a little while. Proof that it was cold? Check out the winter garb.

While we were waiting around, the fog actually began to clear and we started to get a bit of sunlight creeping through. All of a sudden the Grampians were coming alive around us. This shot is pretty terrible quality, but you get the idea. Surely someone up there was thinking “hmm, I feel like making this particular spot shiny, screw the rest of it.”

Jokes aside, while not the most spectacular (depending how you look at it) sunrise the Grampians has ever seen, when you have this kind of scenery around you and an odd, mystical aura about the place, you come to realise just how spectacular it is.

I took a few extra snaps. Looking around the Grampians to get evidence of my time up in that foggy little wonderland, not all of them turned out completely useless. From here we continued towards Adelaide.