Bushwalk 3 - Kincumber to Terrigal

During a week of particularly warm weather I decided to tackle a couple of shorter Central Coast walks from my new book after work. The first on my list was Kincumber to Terrigal.

I've been up to Kincumber Mountain surprisingly few times, given how nice it is & how close to home. After a short & relatively easy climb up the hill on Glasson's trail I reached the Kiosk.

I love this building - it's round & mudbrick & very pleasing to the eye. The real highlight of the walk is the Kanning Walk cave. Here is one side of it on the approach:

The main entrance to the cave is nice, pretty cavey, pretty much what you would expect.

The cool thing about this cave is the second chamber at the back of the main section. You can just see the entrance at the back of the photo below. Apparently people lived in it during the Great Depression, which I think is pretty awesome - I love stories of people surviving in nature like that. I sometimes think I will become hermit myself one day, provided I can find a suitably isolated cave to do it in, of course.

The entrance is a really narrow, low, crawling room only tunnel. I crouched inside the start of it but it was pitch black in there & I didn't have a torch. Long story short, I was just too chicken to crawl through. I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe there is someone still living in there & I had visions of being trapped & strung up on the wall to slowly die. Have possibly been watching too many American crime shows.

After the cave the track turns onto this sandy fire trail. It wasn't a particularly interesting walk, but the weather was glorious & I enjoyed strolling along, listening to the birds.

Unfortunately there were many reminders of civilisation along the way, like these signs every 50 metres or so.

N.B. I'm an Optus customer right? So you might reasonably expect that I would be to make a phone call when I'm standing right next to the 50-foot high Optus tower on Kincumber mountain. Well, you would be wrong to expect that. Because I had no phone reception on this entire walk. Not one bar. Go figure.

After wandering along the fire trail for a while, the walk led me to the Colin Watters lookout. It was a great place to stop for a rest, with views over Picketts Valley to Avoca Beach in one direction:

And over bushland to Terrigal in the other:

After the lookout I headed back downhill & all too soon was faced with this ugly reminder of civilisation in the form of a housing estate.

Overall, an enjoyable walk, though I would have enjoyed some more challenge & variety in scenery.

The Stats
Distance: 4.5kms one way
Time: 1hr
Difficulty: Easy-Medium - only a couple of steep parts, track is narrow at points.