Mount Barney Aerial Sunrise

A follow up to my earlier post about climbing Mount Barney, this aerial shot was taken looking back at the mountain at sunrise. Due to the flat plain all the way to the coast you get an incredible alpen glow that lights up the mountain and lasts for about 180 seconds at most then starts to fade. I had to back the colour saturation off on this shot because the dark orange colour just looked implausible. As you might be able to tell there is NO easy way up Mt Barney!

The east face is one of the largest slabs of rock in Australia at 320m (1050ft) and was first climbed in 1966. The South East ridge that we took our overnight packs up is the defined ridge you can see that runs on the south (left) side of the east face. Logan’s ridge is the one going straight up into the east face on the north side and not suitable for packs without hauling ropes. Peasants or South East Ridge is the simplest ridge and goes down to the south from the saddle between East and West peaks. That said all the ridges involve ascending over 1000m vertical (3280ft) in a day. While not technically challenging from a rock climbing perspective Peasants does have some exposed slab sections and has led to numerous rescues of inexperienced hikers who thought they could simply walk up the mountain which is why they are trying to phase out the name Peasants. There are several other longer and more technically challenging ridges which are hard to see from this aspect.

Mount Barney sits at 1,359m (4,459 ft) altitude (which is higher than one might think given it starts reasonably close to sea level) and is part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area. Mount Barney National Park is in the Scenic Rim Region in south-east Queensland, Australia.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about my background in photography you can read the interview @photofeed did with me here.