Burstall Mountain -- Awesome Scramble

We planned a scramble (hike that, at points, requires you to crawl up mountain passes!) up Burstall Mountain with Ed today. But Katie got so busy at work she wasn't able to come -- but Ed and I still wanted to get out and enjoy the day - so we left for K-Country early Friday morning. What an awesome day! I've done hiking before, but to actually take the billy goat trails to the top was a fantastic experience.

I didn't really know what to expect and when we got to the trail head and Ed pointed up to the top of the mountain (and smiled!), I knew it was gonna be a long day. But with the long climbs comes unreal views, lunch at what seems like the top of the world and a decent that rivals my best experiences on my bike!

Here's Ed at the Trail Head, yup that's the Mountain in the background!

The next photo is Ed taking a break (thank God, I needed to catch-up!) in one of the three (3) shoots that you can climb to get to the saddle.

Here we are at the saddle - you can see the shoots in the darker stone just below us.
And the other photo is of the saddle as we are working our way to the summit -- you get a MUCH better perspective as to how steep those dark stone shoots are from here, eh?!

Here's Ed near the top -- amazing views!

Me near the top!

And here's Ed on the black stones on our way back down the Mountain. He showed me how to basically ski down in the loose rocks -- very cool -- this portion took probably 60 minutes to climb and roughly 6 minutes to get down & man was it fun! The first step over the ledge was the freaky part - but then it was a total blast!

I stopped a little way down to try and capture our "ski path" in the rocks and show how crazy the grade was!

Speaking of GRADE -- check out the Garmin profile for the day. At the steepest point it was 64% Grade!! And we climbed more than 970 Metres.

It was a great day out and very enjoyable journey -- what a way to start a weekend!