Roughly 22 kilometres, six and a half hours including a lunch stop I didn't really need, grade 4 on the Bibbulmun Track Foundation's own scale. Two litres of water carried, one spare bottle in the pack that I didn't touch, wool socks, no gaiters because the track was bone dry the week I did it. That's the section in short, and if you've read anything else I've written about walks in the Perth Hills you'll know I like to get the numbers out of the way before anyone gets carried away with the scenery.
The Kalamunda to Mundaring stretch is one of the northernmost legs of the full Bibbulmun Track, running between the two Perth Hills towns that everyone argues about when they're planning a first Bibbulmun day out. I've written before about that argument, in the piece on which Perth Hills start point wins, and having now walked the section properly, in both the literal sense of finishing it and the sense of not cutting corners, I can say the debate is a bit overcooked. It's a there-and-back argument either way, unless you've got someone to shuttle a car, which I did not, so I walked it Kalamunda to Mundaring and caught the 320 bus back, which took longer than the walk itself and taught me nothing except patience.
Starting from Kalamunda
The trail leaves the Kalamunda town centre with none of the fuss you'd expect from a track that runs all the way to Albany. No grand arch, no crowd, just the Waugal marker on a post and a bit of bitumen before the jarrah takes over. I'd had a coffee at a café on Railway Parade before setting off, more out of habit than need, and I mention it because it's the last real coffee you'll see for hours. Once you're in the trees the character of the walk settles quickly: undulating jarrah-marri forest, well-formed track, the kind of surface where you don't need to watch your feet every second step. That's not nothing. A lot of Perth Hills walking involves picking a line through loose gravel or granite, and this section mostly spares you that.
What it doesn't spare you is the sameness. And this is where I'll admit to a slightly unpopular view, because this stretch gets a fair bit of attention on social media as one of the