Mudgee is better known for wining and dining than it is for outdoor adventures, but this walk is definitely worth taking a break from the wine tasting! The trail itself might be fairly nondescript, but the view at the end is extraordinary.
It felt like arriving at a lost city, where the ruins lay semi-hidden amongst the dense forest. Added to that, it has the perfect sunset view which you’ll probably get all to yourself. You can make the walk as easy or adventurous as you want, which we’ll explain more about later in this post.
Here’s everything you need to know about the Castle Rocks walk, one of the best things to do in Mudgee.
Castle Rocks Walk, Munghorn Gap
The stats
Distance: 4.3km each way
Elevation: 60m
Difficulty: Easy
The walk to Castle Rocks is flat and on a good path. It took us just under an hour to get to the viewpoint. We recommend allowing two hours for the whole walk, and additional time to take in the views.
Starting the trail
The good news is the walk to get to Castle Rocks is easy. And not the kind of easy that includes some hills, this is flat right up until you reach the rocks! The terrain is good throughout - a sandy path through the forest which offers a fair bit of shade.
We’d read that you can sometimes spot emu along the path, which I was very excited about. But alas, all we saw were hundreds and hundreds of cicadas, which occasionally decided to dive bomb us as we made our way through the bush.
The trail is pretty enough, but it wouldn’t be anything to write home about were it not for the incredible ending.
Getting to the rocks
You won’t see any signposts along the path until 150m before you reach the rocks, but they aren’t needed because there isn’t anywhere you could go wrong.
Just before we arrived at the end of the trail, we bumped into three hikers (the only other people we saw the whole time) who told us to watch our step because they had got lost in the rocks and spent over an hour trying to find their way out.
Given we were visiting for sunset, we found that somewhat alarming, but decided to press on anyway. Incidentally, the following day we met someone else who said that an experienced guide had spent six hours lost in the rocks recently too!
Before that puts you off, you definitely don’t have to risk getting lost to enjoy the tremendous views and rock pagodas.
Basically Castle Rocks is a series of rock formations scattered amongst the trees, with the main cluster being the ones you come to first.
The only possible way you could get lost would be to descend this first area and make your way up and over several more rocky outcrops.
If you just want to explore a bit and take in the views, you have no chance whatsoever of getting lost - which is good news as we knew we’d be walking back in the dark!
The views
Once you’ve reached the end of the long flat trail you need to climb up onto the rocks in order to see the view.
In dry weather the rock is really grippy and we found it easy to walk up to the top, it takes just a few minutes.
Once you’re on top you can make it as straightforward or difficult as you want.
We did a bit of exploring around the first rocky area we came to, which required navigating a couple of short ledges and climbing up some taller rocks, but none of it was hard.
Climbing down to get to other rock formations was also not too difficult, but we didn’t carry on any further as we were here for the sunset views. It looked like there were some more adventurous options if that’s what you’re looking for though!
Visiting the rocks for sunset turned out to be a great decision because you have a clear uninterrupted view and it turned out to be one of my favourite sunsets of the whole year.
Not because we got wild colours, but because the view and the whole area was so much more incredible than I had expected.
We couldn’t believe we had it to ourselves, apart from a couple of rock hopping lyrebirds! It really did feel like looking out over the ruins of an ancient city. The pagodas are scattered throughout the bush as far as the eye can see and the whole area is bathed in soft light as the sun begins to sink below the horizon.
It was definitely a hard spot to leave!
The walk back
The great thing about doing this particular walk for sunset is how easy the trail is. If you climb back down the rocks at twilight, there really is no other point that could pose any problems. There’s only one trail and it’s flat with good conditions underfoot, so you don’t need to worry about tripping up.
There is however, one downside, and it’s a big one if you are an arachnophobe like me: the webs. I remember once asking Joe how long it takes for a spider to spin a web, and now I know. Less than the amount of time we were at Castle Rocks watching the sunset!
On the way to the viewpoint, there were none. But on the way back, it was literally every few hundred metres! We spent the entire walk back flicking the trailing webs off our arms and legs, and worse still, hair!
You often couldn’t see them until you were right on top of them and there were a few close calls with some of the denser webs which had the spiders still in them, ugh.
At times it felt like walking through the pages of a Harry Potter novel, with webs everywhere and hundreds of cicadas flapping their wings in the treetops. I have no problem with walking through forests at night, in fact I generally love a good night walk, but this one was more than a little creepy!
That said, I don’t for one second regret going for sunset, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but maybe not in summer, during a bumper spider season!
On that note, it was a particularly abundant spider season this year, so if you’re reading this a while from now, you might not run into the same problems, but I wanted to give fair warning!
Essential information about the Castle Rocks walk
Getting there
The Munghorn Gap Nature Reserve is just under 40km and a 35 minute drive from Mudgee.
Parking for the walk
There is a free car park by the trail head, it’s not very big, but it’s not a busy trail so you shouldn’t have any trouble parking. The last part of the road to the reserve is dirt track, at time of writing it is in fairly good condition and doesn’t require any clearance.
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