Earlier in the week we had been to Stirling Range National Park to walk the famous Bluff Knoll Trail, and this time we were back to do a couple more of the trails – namely the Mount Trio Trail and the Mt Hassell trail.

We started with the Mount Trio trail, which was the easier of the two – a distance of around 4km return and a vertical ascent of 400m. It took us about an hour to get to the top, and although it was a bit overcast the views were not too bad and it was also pretty quiet.

We then descended and had lunch before tackling the Mt Hassell trail – which we found quite hard going (which surely must have been because we were weighed down by our lunch).

This trail was in theory a similar distance and ascent to the Mount Trio trail, but it took us fifteen minutes longer to get to the top due to the rougher terrain and some unmarked sections of the path.

We were pretty exhausted by the time we got back to the car park at the bottom – which I blamed on the roughness of the Mount Hassell Trail and not on the fact that our total ascent of the day had been over 850m…