The first hike of the year took me back to the Great North Walk. At ~250m, Mount Wondabyne, north of Sydney NSW, can’t really be called a mountain, more so a peak, but it is the highest point in Brisbane Waters National Park and a great destination for a father-daughter hike.

This is the first hike of my 12 Hike Challenge for 2026, with the theme “Hike to a view”. As you’ll see in the pictures I think this fits that theme nicely.

It would be a hot day so we tried to leave early, and failed completely. We drive for an hour and arrive at the entrance to the “tunnel track” on Woy Woy road. There was quite a lot of parking space available and we got a spot amongst the other cars.

We started the walk in great spirits, which were lifted further when my daughter heard a rustle in the bush and spotted an Echidna! I haven’t seen one in a couple of years and it always feels special to see one. It ignored us completely, being quite focused on munching on ants or whatever it was finding in the leaf litter. It soon moved out of sight and we took off down the trail feeling amazing.

We started talking about music, or rather my daughter blasted me with facts about her latest music interests, until we reached a small swamp that was spilling over the road. Looking closely at the water we saw many tadpoles and in some shallow pools we found frog spawn. We explored the area then carried on. The swamp became quite large next to us and it seems it used to be a dam related to an old quarry. I wanted to explore it, but didn’t want to push my luck as we were having a great time as it was.

We carried on walking and wondered where this “mountain” was as it was simply nowhere to be seen. We chatted a lot. I said we must be the loudest people on the mountain. We were having a great laugh. After half an hour we spotted “the mountain”, and soon found the turn off to the trail that would take us to the top. The serious work began now and I realized that my daughter had music playing from her phone. I said “oh you’re one of those people. What about my serenity?”. She said “yes I’m one of those people, what about my sanity?”. We were having fun.

I told my daughter my instructions for a good hike:

1. Go slow on the uphill
2. Go fast on the flat
3. Be careful on the downhill
4. Linger for the views

She said I should put that on a t-shirt. I might! Anyway, it helped us get up the hill as we didn’t feel the need to power walk in the hard direction.

We found a small cave and it looked like people sleep there. As we were nearing the top we saw some hiking poles resting against a rock. What if someone had gotten to the bottom and had to come back for them? We climbed up, having to lift ourselves up over some large rises and find footholds that weren’t there to get up and over. We met two ladies who asked if there poles were still there! They said they needed their hands free to climb up and they weren’t wrong! Glad they had owners.

We reached the top and the view were spectacular! It looked like we were in the middle of nowhere, bushland as far as the eye could see. We explored a little and one side gave us a view of Woy Woy and Umina beach I think.

On the way down we met a couple who said they would walk to Little Wobby then wade across the ocean to Patonga! I loved that. Two folks who seem like regular folks but on the weekend they are proper adventure seekers! People do stuff! And it’s brilliant!

The way down was quick but my daughter started to lag and was feeling off. It was getting proper hot now around 28 degrees. If we had started out earlier we could have avoided the heat but we didn’t and now we’re paying for it. We had some water and a rest and a bite to eat. Then we carried on down. We later found she had some decent sunburn on her neck where she had missed putting sunscreen so that would have contributed.

We were walking quite quickly down and out along the Firetrail. My daughter’s mood returned and she played some tunes through her phone (nothing too loud- I could only hear it standing next to her). We said hello to the frog spawn again and were soon back to our car. All up it took around two and a half hours and 7.3km. We climbed 208m.

This was a fantastic way to kick off 2026 and was a wonderful little adventure to have with my daughter- it’s nice she still wants to spend time with dear old Dad! There is a decent amount of variety on this walk so I do recommend it. I would like to return to explore the swamp/dam in the future. Note that there is no YouTube video for this one as it was more of a private walk with my daughter, but I might put out a short of the views at least.

Thanks for reading.