Atherton Tablelands - Mount Hypipamee Crater, Dinner Falls & McKenzie Falls

Mount Hypipamee Crater

Mount Hypipamee Crater is an old volcanic pipe. It's 58m down to the water and the water is 70m deep.

Dinner Falls

The walk to Dinner Falls was very pretty with lots of elkhorns and other epiphytes.

The Dinner Falls consist of three different levels.

This little Brown Gerygone was flitting around on the other side of the falls.

There were also a few birds around the picnic area that distracted us while we ate lunch.

Grey-headed Robin

Pale-yellow Robin

Yellow-throated Scrubwren

Grey Fantail

We could hear an occasional bowerbird high up in the trees and there are two new-to-us species up here, so we were keen to see them. After a while there were a few more birds carrying on and getting annoyed with each other. With much neck craning we managed to see some of them. The photos aren't great because they were so high up and moving fairly constantly, but they are good enough to identify them.

Satin Bowerbirds (male & female)

Tooth-billed Bowerbird

McKenzie Falls

On our way home I planned to stop by another waterfall that looked good in some photos. The National Parks website said "Take this short, easy walk through the forest from the car park to the top of McKenzie Falls" so we expected an easy detour. I was expecting some unsealed road to the falls, but it turned out to definitely be 4WD only! We got to a bit of a bog hole and decided to have a look and see how bad it was just as some dirt bike riders came through. They stopped for a chat and told us this was the worst bit of the road, and there was a side track around it, so we kept going. When we got to the "car park" it was just a wider bit of road with a couple of tracks leading to it. We took the one going down to the falls and then it seemed to finish suddenly. Dazz check some track notes on his Explore Oz app, which said to walk through the scrub, so we did, and came to the top of the falls, with no view of the falls themselves!

It didn't look like a terribly difficult climb down around the side as the rocks were very "stepped" so I scrambled around to get some videos.

There was a different track that led out to the north, so we thought we'd try that because it might be better. Just down the hill from the carpark was the Millstream River that needed crossing. We both looked at it and have seen enough disasters on YouTube videos to know that we would need to walk it first. It was getting late in the day, we were tired, and we had no idea what awaited us on the other side of the river, so decided to just come back the way we came. Here's some short snippets of the trip back from the "carpark".