Blogs from Black Hill Conservation Park, Adelaide Hills, South Australia, Australia, Oceania

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Introduction This blog is about our two recent visits to Black Hill. The first walk was a guided tour on the Southern side of the hill. Dan is part of the CSIRO Double Helix science club. This club is very well organised and has a stack of events to choose from and this was one of them. It was a "Herpetology field trip" to check out the Cunningham skinks - a long living lizard (30 years!) that is distributed through the Mt Lofty ranges. The trip was led by Peter Matejcic who showed us the tricks of lizard spotting. For example - one was the use of a mirror. By reflecting sun light you could shine strong light into deep crevices to see where the lizards were hiding. Another was to look at temperature - ... read more
Walking up a gentle hill
All done with mirrors
Cunningham skink


Introduction Our walk this weekend was a delightful one - a 3 1/2 hour walk in the Black Hill Conservation park. This is our third visit to Black Hill. In October 2005 we did a 2 hour walk based on George Driscoll's recommendation in his book, 50 real bushwalks around Adelaide (see entry); and the summer before we did a 4.5 hour walk (not blogged) from the '20 Nature walks in Mount Lofty Ranges' book. This time, we made up our own walk. It was moderately difficult - none of the climbs were too steep, but there are quite a few of them. Dan handled it reasonably well, while I remember him complaining a lot on our other Black Hill walks, but that could also be because he is just that bit bigger at 9 years ... read more
Our walk map
Park entrance at Gate 5
Pink stars


Welcome readers, It has been ages since we had been walking, with other engagements and foul weather making it impossible to get out. Full of anticipation - with a glorious day before us - we ended up doing a walk that was quite close to home (40 minutes) - the Black Hill Conservation Park. We had visited the Black Hill Park before and had done a 4.5 hour walk - we trimmed it to 2 hours for our late start today - by doing the George Driscoll walk (50 real bushwalks around Adelaide) rather than that recommended track in '20 Nature walks in Mount Lofty Ranges'. The park was in full flower today - and the clear weather afforded excellent views of Adelaide all the way to the coast. There were plenty of lizards (sunnin... read more
Views of Adelaide
Purple flowers
A close up of the Purple flowers




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