Lake Mountain offers quite a few walking trails, ranging from 400m strolls to full-fledged 20km hikes. If you're looking for something short and sweet – and with beautiful scenery – the Lake Mountain Summit Walk is just the thing. Despite being only 5km long, the trail takes you through various alpine scenery and lookout points you would normally only see on more arduous hikes.
My under two-year-old tackled it with relish, undisturbed by the sharp incline. After the first fifteen minutes or so, the track flattens out to a more gentle slope with lots of interesting things to see along the way: colourful wildflowers, skinks, large flat stones; moss-covered logs, bees and miles and miles of snow gums
Typical Melbourne hikes take you through bushland and shrubs, mountain ashes and fern tree gullies. The Lake Mountain Summit Walk however offers you a taste of the high country without having to travel that far.
What you might notice most, however, will be the ghostly gums flanking you on either side. These tall skeletal trees shoot out of the ground like giant toothpicks. You might think they have shed their leaves for the season but then you remember it's summer!
The fact is, these bare branches are a testament to the forest fires that ravaged the area in 2009. While it may be a graveyard of trees of sorts, these white gums lend an eerie beauty to the landscape, dreamy white limbs against a startlingly blue sky.
No walk is complete without a spectacular lookout point and the Lake Mountain Summit Trails does not fail to deliver. On a clear day, you can see Marysville and the Melbourne CBD across a sea of forest and boulders.
From the summit, you can continue doing other walks to make it a loop or head back down to where you started. The Lake Mountain Summit Walk starts right from the Lake Mountain Resort carpark. It's highly accessible and perfect for families of all ages from babies to grandparents, and anyone in between.
For the full range of walks available, visit the Lake Mountain website.
